


Verum Æternus

by UndergroundValentine



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi - Fandom, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Dimension, Angst, Badass Rey, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Force Bond, Force Visions, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, Kylo Ren Redemption, Labyrinth! Au, Protective Kylo Ren, Redemption, The Force, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Tension, force intervention, spoiler heavy for VIII
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-02-15 11:14:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 28,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13029858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UndergroundValentine/pseuds/UndergroundValentine
Summary: There’s a place in the outer rim, held between where twilight is also the breath before dawn, that is said to be haunting and powerful.  And sometimes the Force, being in its own way a sentient and protective part of every living thing and being, takes matters into its own hands regarding those it is strongest within.[In which the fight over the Skywalker saber, and the destruction of the Supremacy, results in interdimensional Force intervention]





	1. - I -

**Author's Note:**

> quite frankly this is just me having fun with an idea originally presented by futurerust-futuredust/t0bemadeofglass, and in the wake of seeing TLJ I saw an opportunity to play with it. :p
> 
> also if Anon - KinkyPeters from wattpad happens to be scrolling through: go fuck yourself! :D

She wakes to the feeling of cool, spongy moss beneath her fingers and her face, a dampness clinging to her hair and her clothes to suggest sleeping through the morning dew.  Eyes fluttering, Rey lifts her head first, blearily blinking back the haze of sleep that has consumed, however briefly, the clarity of her vision.  In minute darkness, she can detect the edges of a pond, the musk of still water and the buzz of insects like thunderous droning to her pulsing head. 

Gritting her teeth, she lowers her head once more, brow braced against the moist sprig of plant life as she shifts her hands.  Pressing, her shoulders burn and protest as though exhausted, joints creaking and aching to support her upper body.  Tucking one knee under herself, and then the other, Rey gasps as she shifts onto her shins, sinking back some as she rubs the moisture and moss from her face.  Bits of it stick and cling to her skin, indents left behind along her cheek as she glances around once more.

A morning dew, for sure, but no morning in sight.

No morning.  No starship.  No throne room, or Praetorian guards.  No Ben.

_Kylo_ , a whisper teases in her ear.  _Not Ben_.

Indeed, there is a pond but a stone’s throw from where she rests, though there are no bugs to accompany the buzzing she was certain she heard.  Breathing slowly, she sees a scattering of reeds and fronds of grass poking along the edges, deep emeralds and soft sages coated in a sheet of glittering droplets, diamonds resting on plants and gleaming in the cool light overhead.  Where she rests is only moss, an impression of her body beneath her knees and where her upper half had been resting, arms bent and hands near the shape of her head.

Face down.  Dropped?  Collapsed?  She can’t recall how she got here, or even what _here_ is meant to be.  Whatever it is, it’s certainly not the _Supremacy_.

A chill creeps down her spine as she looks up into a blanket of purple and blue sky, spotted with stars that seem to flicker and flash.  A trick, perhaps, to her weary eyes, or maybe distant fighters, or starships—those are bigger, those she’d be able to see from a distance—but… that doesn’t seem quite right, either.  Yet high, higher than it should be, is the moon—pure and bright, silver and fine.  No clouds to cover its face, only the delicate gleam of that perfect silver light. 

Blinking slowly, Rey focuses, and stares hard at that perfect moon, finding no craters, no blemishes, nothing to deign it as any moon she’s so used to seeing.  No, this moon is untouched, unscarred by space, by time.  Non-reflective, yet gleaming like a mirror nonetheless.  Her chest feels tight, and so she looks away at last, back down to the dew-drop covered leaves, the glass-top pond, and beyond—only darkness.

Across the pond is an outcropping of trees, wide trunks and spindling branches that carve into one another and reach out toward the sky, toward the water, toward her, a sigh breathing through their limb with a gust of wind.  Another shiver rolls through her body as Rey shifts again, slowly propping one foot up, legs protesting with quivering muscle and a hollowness in her bones.  Moaning, she throws her arms out to balance herself, stumbling a handful of steps as her feet steady, her body finding bearing. 

When she looks down again, the only moss that appears disturbed is immediately beneath her boots. 

Teeth chattering with cold, Rey glares down at the moss, begging her eyes to cease their nonsense and betray the place at last where she had been laying.  She takes a step, and then two, back to where she was certain she’d been resting.  Her clothes are still damp, her cheek still irritated with spiraling patterns.  Yet there is no mark, no change in color or imprint of her figure in the field below. 

Strange, she thinks to herself.  Strange and unsettling, this place.

Tearing her attention from her feet, she looks up again, out across the still waters of the pond, to the distant shadows of the skeletal trees, their branches creaking as though they were old bones.  A look over her shoulder, and there are more trees, just as desperately clawing toward the sky and the pond as the ones in front of her, black against a purple and blue horizon. 

Swallowing thickly, she looks ahead once more, taking a single step, and then another, around the shallow bank of the pond.  Near silent are her steps, the soft soles of her boots barely rustling the wet moss as she circles the edge, intent on walking toward the trees.  Bringing her arms around herself, her fingers cling and dig into the goosebumps and stiff hair of her forearms, the wrappings soaked at her wrists, her eyes unblinking as she moves further around the edge of the pond.  Lips parted, her breath is light, shaking as it stutters between her teeth, pluming gingerly in front of her lips as a white fog, before disappearing under her nose. 

Around she moves, before she stops.  No closer are those trees, and when she looks back from whence she came, the forest edge that had been behind her is just as far away as it was before.  Heart skipping, she glances down to the moss, its slick surface undisturbed despite the assurance that she has indeed moved her feet, taken steps, walked—

Yet there’s nothing.  She stands near the bank with the same reeds and the same fronds dazzled in diamond dew drops, and she has not moved.

“What?”  She whispers, the word fogging in front of her face, not so shapeless as her prior exhale, before disappearing as well.  Eyes wide, she breathes again, watching her breath shift and mold into the air, clinging to a cold that is not yet unbearable, yet is certainly uncomfortable. 

For half a heartbeat, she’s certain she sees another word, one she did not speak, yet perhaps in the midst of her anxious mind she might have thought it, and in that thinking could have projected her thought into the air before her face.  _Water,_ her breath seems to say, fading to nothing as she follows its path up, up to the silver moon once more.  That perfect, gleaming silver moon.

Down again, her attention moves to the soaked moss, the reeds and fronds, before she sees the glass-top of the pond water, dark yet… not.  It does not reflect the moon as she thinks it should, but had she changed position, had she walked as she thought, it may have.  For where she stands now, looking into the black depths, the moonlight cannot touch. 

Is it another test?  Surely it must be—she left Master Skywalker and Ahch To what feels like so long ago, now, yet the swirling dark and calling of the pond must be the same whispers, the same calling of the underground cavern.  There is something here that beckons her with an answer, she just needs to find it, to understand it.

_Resist it_

Frowning, Rey shifts, turning to face the water fully now.  Another sigh whistles between the tree branches, beckoning fingers barely twitching despite the creak of wood, the groan of age-old bodies.  Clenching her jaw, she steps forward, moss shifting and squeaking beneath her feet, but she does move closer to that water.  Still, there is no moonlight, no sound other than the moan of the trees and her boots moving across wet plant and earth, the sole of it sinking as she stops at the edge of the water.

Kneeling slowly, Rey shifts, leaning to one side and then another, seeking the moon’s reflection across the surface.  It hides, yet, even when she’s sure she should see it.  Beneath her legs, the ground is cold, soft despite this, her knees sinking just a touch into the smooth dirt, minerals staining into the gentle linen of her trousers. 

A glance to her left, and she finds a reed within reach, its stem burrowed into the soft dirt just outside of the water’s touch.  It’s a long, skinny, and spindly looking thing, firm under the grace of her touch.  There’s weight behind it, and that’s all she can ask for.  Plucking it does not disturb the surface of the pond, but the crack of the stem snapping sounds like a whip, and she flinches in response.

Looking about, there are no shadows shifting in the dark and distant trees, there are not other sounds by the sighing and the echo of the reed breaking until it, too, fades like her breath.  Biting her lip, she looks to the pond once more, fingers cold and trembling as she raises the weed, and tosses it out to the water.

It lands, and stops, resting atop a mirror.  Rather, it must surely be a mirror, she can see the reflection of the piece of plant just below the plant itself.  Shivering, Rey gasps quietly as she straightens up, tingles creeping along the back of her neck and down her spine as she waits, and waits, for that plant to shift, tremble, and sink beneath the water.

It does not.

Snatching another reed, this one a touch farther than the last and closer to the edge of the pond-mirror, she snaps its stem and curses the cracking whip that cuts through the silence, ricocheting off the trees and their clawing branches.  Chucking the plant, she watches it soar with wide eyes and a pounding heart, before it lands next to its like.  No ripples, no sounds, just resting there, as though daintily laid rather than thrown with force.  Firm, and not sinking. 

Standing, her breath shudders between her teeth as she looks down at her feet, the tips of her boots but an inch from the pond’s edge.  Backing away, and onto the moss once more, Rey keeps her eyes on the center of the pond, where the broken reeds lay in wait.  Her legs move, the creaking of her boots on wet moss like drumming to her ears, but even staring at the pond, her distance does not increase. 

Whimpering some, her brow furrows again as she moves with intent, forward this time.  She comes back to the pond’s edge, having moved toward the glass-like surface, toward the reeds.  But the trees across the pond are just as far as before, when first she’d seen them.

_What is this place?_ she asks herself, staring hard at her feet, and ignoring the breath plume and take form as it hovers above her, a shape that would not be recognizable even if she were to pay attention to it, fully.  Her tongue sours between her teeth, and she swallows the thick knot forming in her throat.  Lifting her head, Rey gazes out toward the trees once more. 

Nothing.  Nothing but darkness, with only the silver light over her to illuminate anything.  Worse is this than the cavern, with its mile-long replication of herself, the echoing of her snaps, her whispers, the reaching for the image that was meant to be her parents, her history, her place in all of this.

_They were nothing_

“Hello?” calls Rey, yet unlike the reeds and their whip-sounds of broken stems, or the hissing whispers of her prior questions, this word falls flat, dull to her own ears.  Contained in a lock box of sound and heard only in her mind, it does not echo through the trees. 

“ _Hello?_ ”  She tries again, met with the same hollow sound, her throat pulsing lightly as though having screamed.  Nothing.  Not even the sighing of old trees to greet her this time. 

Shaking, Rey looks to the pond once more—the pond that is not a pond, but a mirror, a piece of glass, or a patch of ice—finding the reeds to still be in place near the center where she’d tossed them.  Unmoving, unchanging, she huffs as she raises a foot, stretching it out, before lowering it onto the surface. 

A moment of hesitation has her twitching, and her knee jerks, her foot coming down hard and slamming against what surely feels like steel—not ice, not glass, not even stone, but _steel_.  Cold and unrelenting, a flare surges through her ankle and her leg, a grimace crossing her face as she steadies herself, and looks out once more. 

The reeds have shifted ever so slightly from their original resting place, but remain motionless now, their reflection still beneath them in the surface of the pond. 

Clenching and unclenching her fists, Rey presses and takes another uncertain step, this time her left foot coming down a touch gentler than the last.  There’s still a flash, a moment of agony in her ankles as pins and needles begin to creep under her skin.  Baring her teeth, she focuses on the reeds as she walks, one foot in front of the other, pain flaring occasionally beneath her knees, through her thighs, into her hips the closer to the plants she draws.

Gasping, she nearly falls, hands swinging to catch herself as she bows and makes eye contact with her reflection. 

Warped, shimmering thing that it is, her reflection, with her hair tickling her shoulders and around her jaw, her eyes wide and fearful.  There is no moon overhead in the surface, nothing but purple and blue darkness behind her reflection, just as haggard and worn as she feels. 

Breathing hard, the fog forms and scatters from her mouth, pluming down and spreading across the top of the pond, momentarily obscuring her own face.  She waits, knowing she must stand straight, knowing she must reach the center without distinct understanding of _why_ , yet the conviction that she _must_ claws at her core, at her lungs. 

_Stand, walk,_ her mind begs of her, urgent in a voice that is hers, echoing with someone who is not her.  Yet Rey remains bent over, fingers nearly skimming the surface that her feet rest upon, her reflection bowed and bent to meet her.  The fog clears from her face, and the world shifts, tilting, until she is looking up and falling into the moonless purple, blue, and black.


	2. - II -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recently updated - 1/12/18

Breath floods her mouth, her chest, panic crawling under her flesh like krykna hatchlings skittering from their eggs for the first time.  Flailing, she throws her arms out, gathering in her fingers gritty handfuls of dust and sand, sharp edges and flakes scraping her skin and cutting along her palms.  Hissing, Rey lets go, sitting up against the base of a pale cream sand dune, pinpricks of blood beginning to well across both of her hands, flashes of pain pulsing between the creases.

It’s brighter here, that much is clear.  Unlike the perfect silver moonlight she remembers from before, daylight has come here.  Or, rather, it would be here, full and warm, if not for the perpetual haze of what she can only imagine is smoke overhead.  Both heat and light are dimmed, shadows shifting and twisting in the air itself, yet when she looks down to the sands around her once more, there are no changes to wash across the dunes.  Groaning, Rey looks at her hands again, seeing beads of red pool and smear across her skin, as though having touched powdered glass and received a dozen or more microscopic cuts.  It stings like hell and back, but after a moment spent patting the excess fabric of her clothes, the droplets of blood cease.

Around her remains that perpetual silence, just as deafening as it had been by the pond.  _What is this?_ Breathless, Rey goes to clench her hands, wincing as the sting flares fresh with heat.  Gingerly, she clamors to her feet, some of those same grains of sand scraping and digging into her bare calves and through the linen of her clothes. 

_Where am I?_

_You’re my guest_

Her breath catches briefly in her throat at the memory, eyes widening as she glances around the dusty dunes, the smoke haze fluttering overhead, obscuring most of the glow of sunlight.  It’s a soft thing, that whisper, old and buried in the hardened parts of her subconscious, the hum of the breach still fresh along her temples.  Heart pounding between her ribs, she spins around, seeing nothing but rolling hills of sand and debris, occasional gusts of silent wind sending cascades of grit rolling along, whipping into the air.  Her tongue is thick, and dry, teeth bared as she listens, and listens.

_Reach out with your feelings_

She’s reminded, perhaps dreadfully, of her life on Jakku—the AT-AT she called home, the intensity of the distant setting sun, the barren and dry heat that radiated across every inch.  This place is colder than Jakku, smoke and haze clouding what light and warmth should be touching, the air tasting of foul decay.  Reaching for one of the sashes of fabric hanging near her thigh, Rey tugs it free before bringing it up, and wrapping it around her nose, mouth, and throat.

Too much like Jakku, indeed.

Covered, she steps, sinking a bit into the sands as she begins to walk.  Her hands throb and pulse beneath the surface of her skin, the cuts puffy and irritated from the grit of the sand.  She’s endured worse, a hum of heat and fire surging along her right arm in concurrence to this truth, and so she presses onward, eyes narrowed to the fractured light and the waves of rolling sand.

Endless, these waves and these dunes, shapeless and daunting.  Sweat begins to form across her brow, prickling in her hairline and rolling down her back, yet chills continue to course between her bones and along her spine.  Her fingers twitch, pain pulsing occasionally through every inch and nerve, and Rey finds herself gnawing on the soft linen of the wraps around her face, brow furrowed and shoulders taught as she presses onward. 

 _What is this place?_ she tries again, glancing behind herself to see the trenches left in her wake, the path of her steps carved into the bits of crunching, bitter sand.  Better to see that she’s made progress than to wonder if she’s made any at all.  She recalls the pond—the mirror, with the reeds, and the purple and blue sky, though how she was able to walk and then fall through…

It makes no sense.  None of this.  Last she can remember, she was on the _Supremacy,_ she’d just watched the fall of Supreme Leader Snoke, his eyes wide and petrified with the truth of betrayal before his body split in half.  She can remember the Praetorian guards, the combat that ensued with her and Ben fighting side by side—

 _Kylo_ , her mind corrects, seething around the edges as she trumps down another small dune, dust kicking up around her feet, the grains of sand larger here, and sharper than before.  _Not Ben.  Kylo_.

Her heart twists, lips peeling back into a grimace behind her wrappings as she presses forward, her boots crunching more than sinking through the sands, sharp bits occasionally sticking to the woolen exterior.  There’s a tremor in her core as her heartbeat thumps painfully in her palms, tears beginning to sting the corners of her eyes. 

_Not Ben._

_Why not?_

Gasping, Rey stops, turning around so quick that her hair whips her own face.  Her eyes are wide, seeking, searching, insisting to find the source of the voice that floods her mind and burrows into her bones.  The same voice that came to her so strangely, so suddenly but a handful of mornings past, yet again feels like a lifetime ago all together.  Still, there’s nothing around her.  Nothing but sand dunes and an ashen sky, a shifting and shimmering beacon of light that is marred, obscured, its light and warmth denied to her.

 _Where are you?_ she calls, nearly shouting in her own head.

_I’m right here_

She turns again, breathless as she reaches up and claws the wrapping from her nose and mouth.  The air still tastes of death, pungent and rotten, and Rey has to fight from gagging openly as she squints, staring across the open and barren scape. 

Nothing.  Still nothing.

_Reach out_

The memory of the words is from Master Skywalker’s tutelage, but the voice is not the old Jedi.  It’s younger, softer, one that both frightens and calms her soul and her racing heartbeat. 

_Don’t be afraid—I feel it, too_

_Don’t,_ she thinks, gritting her teeth a bit as she moves forward still, the dunes evening out to steady, almost flat land.  The sands still shift and sink around her feet, the grains becoming more like pebbles now the further she moves.  The shrouded sun remains directly overhead, wavering in its orange and grey light.  Ever present, though, is the lack of shadows save for the one attached to her feet, pooling around her body and following her steps, the smoke above clearly doing little other than obscuring the light, the warmth.

Cold had been the pond, and the silver moon, yet not so that she felt frozen, or shaken to her core.  Chilled was all, and now here with a sun and an apparent daylight, there’s no heat, no light but that from the shimmering star and the soft glow off the crushed bits of sand.  Like the way the world feels muted during an eclipse, where there’s just enough of a halo to see the life and the state of existence, but its almost colorless, vacant. 

Not so colorless or vacant as Jakku, yet the longing in her heart festers, and remains.

_Let the past die_

_“_ Enough,” she growls quietly, foregoing the strain of speaking with such clarity in her mind alone.

_You’re still holding on—let go_

“ _Stop_ that,” Rey says, blinking back tears and dust as she stomps forward again, her boots crunching more and more on what feels less like sand, or even pebbles, and more likes rocks, or glass. 

Looking down, she finds the same off-white and cream-colored fragments, larger now than they were before.  Frowning, she takes another step, and another to follow, the breaking of shards sharper now than the were before, pressing deeper into the soles of her boots, the soft woolen fabric that wraps around her ankles.  Like broken glass, they stick and cling, until shards become pieces, and pieces become chunks.

Lifting her gaze slowly, Rey looks out across the land before her—flatter now than the dunes she awoke in, flatter than the land she’d been marching across.  This, now, is a field, a valley, strewn of fragments that are indistinguishable to whole pieces she recognizes as ribs, femurs, portions of skulls.  There are even whole skeletons, scattered, piled upon one another, upon more crushed bone and dust.

Her eyes find her hands again, the cuts aching, flecks of bone dust still clinging to her skin.

 _What is this place?!_ she begs, her thoughts running rampant as tears well her eyes, her gaze lifting to the horizons.  Wind kicks, brushing through her hair, making the excess fabric and wrappings of her clothes billow and flap around her.  Dust gathers and swirls, spinning lazily around her feet and along the sea of remains in front of her.

_Don’t you recognize it?_

“Recognize it?” Rey demands, stumbling back a step, the sole of her boot cracking through a pile of rubble.  “Am I meant to?”

_You’ve seen it_

There’s a flash, somewhere deep in the back of her mind as Rey feels dampness, rain soaking her skin, her hair, her clothes.  Her feet trudge not through bones and dust but through mud, through blood, the dark of the night clouding around her as she falters back another step.  What once were bones are bodies, flesh and blood and dead, with a crowd of masked and black-clad figures, brandishing weapons of all styles, all manners of implementing pain and agony—

And Kylo Ren, masked, soaked through as well, the silver gleam that frames around the eye slit shining so bright that she feels blinded by it, if only for a moment, as his head whips in her direction.

_You’ve seen it_

“No,” she mumbles, turning away from the throng of bones and decay, less piled, far more scattered now.  She can see the spaces between them, where once she swore there was more dust, more bones, more—more death.  Now, the desert floor clears, the winds gentle blowing away the fine power until she sees the space once discovered in her vision, another relic of time that feels so very distant to her present. 

With the clearing of excess comes the reveal of truth—crumbling and broken helmets, tattered bits of leather and tunic.  Her feet no longer sink, but instead patter quietly against dry, broken rock and dead earth, packed sand and grit, cobbled and cold under her boots.  Fingers twitching, fire pulses through her palms and her wrists, the ache burrowing deeper and deeper still until she can only turn away, rushing from the field of disintegrating bodies. 

 _“_ Why would you show me this?”  She gasps, shaking her head some as she wipes her face with the back of her hand.

_I didn’t—you came for it yourself_

_“_ Liar!”

_You wanted to understand_

“What am I meant to understand?”  Rey howls, fists clenched as she stops, whipping back around to see—

Nothing.  Nothing but dunes of rolling off-white sand.  Bone dust. 

Shaking, Rey shrieks, red flashing under her skin and behind her vision as she turns away, backtracking her initial progress in favor of fleeing that hell.  Though it may seem gone, she can’t bring herself to care, or trust it, not when it’s still so fresh, not when she can still feel water on her face, the crackle of that fractured saber’s red light like a beacon in her mind.

“I just want out,” she says, voice shaking and weak as she practically crawls back up the dunes, feet sinking and sliding as her fingers rake through the grains, fresh cuts slicing into her fingertips.  Grimacing, Rey braces through it, pushing up over another dune, and another, legs hollow and worn, sweat beginning to pour down her face as she wades back to the spot she woke in.  “I want out of here—wherever here is.”

_We never left_

“That’s a fat load of nonsense,” Rey retaliates, sneering a bit as she slips down another slope, tiny bone shards scraping along her calves and through her trousers.  Pinpricks of red warm and well under the skin, droplets beginning to form.  “Look around, or can you not see?  I’m stuck on some _kriffing_ desert plane of _bone_ dust and sand.  I’d say I’m not where we were before.”

_Your carelessness is causing you pain, stop_

“Like you care.”

_I do_

Somehow the words seem to hurt more than she expects, far more than she wants them to.  Gritting her teeth, Rey shakes her head again, mopping the back of her hand across her eyes again as they smart with tears.  She flew to him in vain, in hope and faith that she could help, that he would let her help.  Called out for her foolishness, she continued to hope when he stared her down in that blood red throne room, slaughtering his master and tormenter instead of her.

She hoped.  She still hopes.

_Rey_

“Don’t do this.  Not now,” she whispers, stumbling down the last dune, following the footsteps she carved what must have been hours ago by now.  The tracks remain as fresh as they’d been when she left this place, untouched even by the winds that billowed through and cleared the field across the plane.  Unlike the pond, and the moss she couldn’t leave an impression upon to save her life. 

Across the dune she’d been laying upon, she can see where the sands seem to shift, loose and dry, and softer than that she’s been walking upon.  Biting her lip, Rey digs her feet into the thick of the dune, bits of bone dust clinging and scratching her shins as she climbs to the top, breathless and trembling as thin smears of blood stain her legs and her hands red. Breathless, she turns and stares back across the rolling desert.

It remains as it had before, only her footsteps having left an unsteady carving through its flowing surface.  Like a scar across flesh.

Shivering some, Rey feels goosebumps crawl along her forearms and her shoulders, a tremor shaking her core as she turns away again, following the slope down to where the sand softens, the air whistling faintly as the smoke swirls and twists overhead. 


	3. - III -

How long she walks is unknown, for the hazy orange and black smoke doesn’t change, the glow of the bone sand doesn’t change, and the endless sea of cream and grey that stretches out before her mocks with relentless abandon, shimmering only when her eyes are weakest, and her mind unguarded. 

Her feet and legs ache, flecks and smears of blood dried and cracking against her skin, fire pulsing beneath the surface with every step.  The sands are finer, and so she does not fear cutting or hurting herself further should she fall, but the prospect of touching more of this desolate waste with her bare hands and body is dissatisfying at best.  Focusing on putting one booted foot in front of the other is a chore, though, and it seems with every moment that she contemplates her actions down motions and effort it takes to accomplish them, her mouth becomes drier, salty sweat sticking to her face and soaking her clothes. 

Thinking of the pond that isn’t a pond, Rey wonders again how she fell through it.  It had been solid, sturdy steel beneath her soles, polished and reflecting her image so clearly she surely must have been looking at a clone instead.  Her body trembles, teeth chattering weakly as she looks up again, out across the pale white sea of dust. 

It had seemed to even out, to spread to something different.  Was she mistaken?  Is it another trick of this place, this strange and vacant realm where the more she earnestly stumbles along, the further away what she needs becomes?

Swallowing dryly, Rey winces as she looks up to the shrouded sun again, blinking slowly as she admires the halo around its burning curves, the smoke wafting and churning lazily.  It looks close enough to reach, to touch, and for a moment she considers raising her hand, dipping her fingers into that ashy shadow to see if its as near as she wants it to be.  But her hands remain at her sides, fingers twitching briefly as she lowers her gaze once more, an echo hollowing itself around her ears, focus drawing her forward.

There, but ten paces away, dressed in his dark boots and dark clothes, the scar carving from above his eyebrow, down his nose and cheek, disappearing under the thick collar of his coat, is Kylo Ren.

“What?”  She groans, throat croaking the question as dehydration robs her strength further.  His eyes harden, a dark void of pain, of frustration, and tenderness.  He’s out of place here, clean and cool unlike her—drenched in sweat and blood, hair matted to her temples and the back of her neck, fingertips scraped, purple and red. 

 _You’re not in the same place as me,_ he says, his eyes roving over her briefly.  Her breath shudders, lungs and chest too tight for the rush that floods her.   _Well… you are.  I can feel you here.  But not… here._

”Imagine that,” she huffs, shaking her head as she takes another step forward.  He doesn’t move, only his eyes following her path as he shifts and turns when she begins to walk by. 

 _What does it look like?_ his voice is soft, like the way it was on Ahch-To, when she was curled up in a blanket in her hut.  _Where you are._

“Like Jakku,” Rey breathes, glancing away from him, and back to the desert around her.  An endless ocean of bone dust and decay, the smoke swirling overhead, the sun a shimmering and cold star.  “But… it’s not nearly as hot.  It’s cold, actually.  The sky looks like it’s on fire.”

 _On fire,_ he says, not a question, but acknowledging her words, her statement.  He looks pensive, momentarily, and Rey continues to walk on without him. 

If he follows, she doesn’t notice; only the sounds of her own footsteps sinking and crunching lightly through the sand can be heard between her breaths and her sighs, sweat continuing to soak into her clothes and her hair.  It’s not hot, but she feels like she’s burning up, her skin flushed and damp with perspiration, the heavy linens and wool of the fabric tugging on her shoulders, her belt digging into her hips.  She’d discard it if not for the fact that she needs it, the ensemble familiar.

Not to mention, she still has no concept of what this place is, or where she’s been dumped.  Should she leave anything behind, there is no guarantee that she’ll ever be able to retrieve it again.

A moment takes her, and she reaches for her belt, for a blaster or—or for the saber, but… no.  It’s gone.  In the red throne room, on the _Supremacy_ ship, she and Kylo fought over it, desperate in their efforts to claim ownership of a saber that belongs to neither of them, yet exists in his family name, and calls frequently to her.

They’d struggled, straining and shouting, and Rey frowns softly as she stares off, her fingers tickling her right side as she remembers the Force pushing them away, yet ripping their souls together as well, the saber twitching, held aloft between them before it cracked and shattered into two fragments.  They were blown apart from one another, with the halves of the saber flying across the room.

And it had all gone dark, then.

“What happened?”  She says softly, not looking behind to validate the change in the air behind her.  He’s not here, not really.  But the air moves, the dark of his presence—conflicted and torn, yet eager to remain near—looming at her back.  “When we were knocked back?  What happened?”

 _I don’t know,_ Kylo breathes, his voice so loud, so clear in her mind she thinks it was spoken aloud, in her ear.  She turns, but he is several paces away, closer now than before, but not as close as—

“You know more of the Force than I do,” Rey insists.  “You must know _something_.”

 _I don’t,_ he says, harder this time in answer, though not tone.  Never tone; he stays soft, gentle even, a heaviness in his eyes that has her gut twisting painfully, wrenched down toward her feet.

Pursing her lips, Rey keeps walking, her feet sinking less and less in the sand the farther along she goes.  Good, maybe there will be some stability, something new to see amongst the vast and endless plane.  But ahead there is nothing but… grey and orange sky, and cream-white packed sand and rock, like salt flats from distant mineral planets she’s heard so much about.  Just openness, barrenness, empty and void of anything but the strange cool of the air, the heat of her skin, and the bond that’s tethered her to the galaxy’s most hated force-user.

_Foolish child_

It’s a whisper deep down that makes her skin crawl, gooseflesh prickling along her arms, her legs, teasing down her back and through her throat, inching its way long the left side of her jaw, her cheek, gritty and gnarled nails touching her face and her temple.  A ghost of a touch that still lingers, clawing its way into her veins, her nerves, the agony of such an overwhelming presence persisting with a dull and ravenous throb to the center of her forehead.  Shivering, Rey shakes herself quickly as she ventures forward still, keeping her head down this time instead of looking up, watching her feet scrape across smooth, packed bone dust and desert plain, powdered in off-white and grit. 

She is foolish, truly, to have hoped, to _continue_ to hope despite herself.  Her shoulders ache as she curls her fingers into fists at her sides, palms pulsing with a dull fire that makes her eyes sting with tears anew.  Damn her.  And damn him, too.  Damn everything, every moment of it all, down to the screaming of Master Skywalker’s voice in her ear. 

_Resist it_

And she couldn’t even do that much, when it had once been so easy.

Clenching her jaw, she breathes deeply through her nose, blinking rapidly to brush the grief and shame from herself.  No, she’ll not do this now.  She won’t cry, not here, not now, not when there is no water to replenish what she’s already lost, and not when the steady purr of his mind still teases at the heartbeat of her own.

Lifting her head, she sees the wide and open horizon, and Kylo standing in front of her again, dark and broody as ever.  Yet his eyes—

“I hate when you do that,” she hisses, changing her footing to move around him. 

 _Do what?_ he says, the smarmy bastard, watching her intently as she brushes past a shape that she does not feel.

“ _That,_ ” she insists, waving loosely toward his image.  It doesn’t change, it doesn’t even really move, though she’s seen him move before.  She’s seen him walk, pace, beckon and reach for her.  She’s felt the touch of his hand even though they were entire jumps apart before; now, though, there’s nothing.  Not even a hint.  

_Would you rather I left you alone?_

“Yeah, actually, I would,” Rey finds herself speaking, not even really understanding the weight of his question before the humming that had buzzed around her ears, her mind, the gentle hum that tugged like a heartbeat on her chest fades in an instant.  When she looks, there is only sand and packed desert floor, the shimmering sun, the smoke and swirling ash just out of reach over her head. 

Huffing, her shoulders fall, fists tightening at her sides before she relaxes her fingers at last.  Exhausted, her feet carry her forward anyway, aimless in their stride as she leaves the dunes and the field of bones far, far behind her. 

In the sudden quiet, she recalls the flat of Niima Outpost, the steaming, sour water trough, the traders and junkers, Unkar Plutt’s tented pavilion on the outskirts where the Falcon lie in wait, rusting and sun-bleached for years, the quad-jumper a hundred yards off and glowing a great red prize waiting to be snatched.  She remembers her abode in the fallen AT-AT, the wall scratched with so many marks to count the days, the number burned into her mind and growing every day.  _Five thousand, five hundred, and six days…_

What a miserable, lonely, and isolating life.  But it had been a simpler life.  It had been an easier life.  Wake up at the rise of dawn, fill her canteen and her bottle, pack her speeder and go.  Collect what she could, return before midday to clean and check for irreparable parts, turn them into Plutt, receive a portion or two if she had done good, return to her home, eat, dream…

Dream. 

How simple was it when her dreams were of so much more, of things she couldn’t put terms or names to, places she had never fathomed in her waking life?  Clutching the hands of people without faces, without titles, desperate for what shred of familial warmth she could try to conjure in her desperation.  What of her little simulator to teach her to fly and navigate, her rebellious and adventurous nature putting her into speeders, piloting scrap ships that Plutt paid so little mind to that it didn’t matter if they went missing at the odd hours of night? 

Ignorance and simplicity might have been bliss for anyone other than her, anyone else who did not dream and see islands amidst ocean blues on planets across the galaxy.  To anyone else who did not hear the whispers, pressed just to the shell of her ear, into the back of her mind, guiding her toward a path that would take her from her desert planet, her wounded heart clinging to a family, to people she begged and pleaded to return while always knowing they never would.

And why wouldn’t they?  Was she really nothing to them?  Did it matter so little as to bring a child into the world, into a place of decrepit and terrible existence, to in turn drop a girl of four years old, her shrieks unheard as they turned and fled?  Was it worth it, she wonders?  To scuttle into their ship and take off into the sky, into the sun so that she could not see them running away, abandoning her, abandoning their daughter—

_They were filthy junk traders, sold you for drinking money.  They’re buried in a pauper’s grave in the Jakku desert..._

Gritting her teeth, Rey bows and presses her hands to her knees, doubled over as her chest caves, a sob threatening with the ferocity of rage and agony to wrench itself from her lips.  Barred behind a clenched jaw, tension swells and pulses up through her temples and into her head as her nails dig into the damp fabric covering her knees.  Cold takes her, gnawing at the edges of her ribs, consuming her lungs, swallowing her heart, creating a vacuum in her center that demands all the attention and affection she has been denied her whole life long, yet never once pausing to let her really _feel_ it.

And how does one live, feeling everything so deeply, so intimately, down to the very core of existence and essence, yet being denied to express or understand it?

Lowering her head, Rey trembles, swallowing hard around a knot that threatens to close, to suffocate and stifle ever thought, every word she’s ever wanted to say.  Droplets roll from the corners of her eyes down her face as she rises slowly, gouged and raw, body aching from the innermost depths of her soul through her fingers and toes. 

_I’m being torn apart_

He’s not here, but his words find her again, soft-spoken things that she did not hear when they were originally uttered, and so she can only surmise that it is the will of the Force that she knows them, now.  Whether by a breach of her consciousness into his, or a projection from him to her, it doesn’t matter ultimately.  They exist now, these words, this thought, this _sensation_ of feeling everything _all at once_ , and yet not at _all_.

Teeth chattering as she exhales, Rey curls her arms around herself once more.  _Walk,_ she thinks, and so her feet follow, until somewhere along the way the smoke bleeds from the sky, the desert floor giving way to stone, and she stands at the mouth of a cobbled and grey arch, open rock walls and cracked paths of a great and howling labyrinth.


	4. - IV -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Made some formatting and tag changes, nothing too crazy though. :p

Whatever, and wherever, this place is, Rey cannot be entirely certain, yet the daunting sprawl of weathered slate and cobblestone before her looms, moaning with an age that is endless, timeless.  Walls on either side of her tower, easily, ten or fifteen feet, pebbled and crushed in too many places to find possible footholds or secrets.  The arch that curls above her is wrapped and mottled with moss, vines, cracks lacing its face as she steps forward, sweat and dust clinging to her every inch, sprinkling off with her movement. 

Breathing slowly, she glances behind again, expecting to see the desert she departed, the rolling plane of cream-white grain and orange skies, burning and shimmering.  It should exist, after all, for her hands and legs are still marred with the cuts and dried blood, bone dust clinging to her boots and her clothes, the sweat of exertion from climbing dune after dune leaving her sticky and salty.

But it’s not there.  It’s gone.

In place of the desert is nothing but stone—a path that she did not take, walls she did not pass, a darkness down farther than she can see that flickers and twists.  Turning fully from the arch, Rey stares hard at that empty space, the carvings of the labyrinthine walls creaking as though in perpetual agony.  There is no dust but that which falls from her shoulders and the fabric of her garb, there is no burnt orange shimmer amongst a sky of smoke and ash.  There is just… stone.

Walking forward, she wonders if perhaps it’s another trick, something in her mind betraying her.  But her steps are solid against the rock, her fingers reaching out to brush a bit of moss away from two pieces wedged and crushed together.  A minute or two and she glances back, seeing the arch some hundred yards away.  An ominous thing, curving up towards the clouded sky with broken bits barely held together, the wind quietly billowing around its frame, the vines and shreds of sickly dark leaves clinging to it flapping like leather wings, dripping with moisture.

 _Is that what happened?_ she thinks, shivering some as she pulls her hand from the wall she’d grazed, looking down to find bits of moss and grime clinging to her lacerated fingertips, her palms angry, swollen and red with irritation.  Cool it had been against her skin, the slime slick and smooth, like oil.  Is she foolish enough to keep failing, to continually disregard that which seizes control and warps her surroundings, her mind, her heart?  Is she blind to her circumstances?

_Foolish child_

No, she’s not.  Hopeful, maybe, naïve… perhaps.  Foolish, never.  Snarling softly, she pushes off again with bristled intent, walking further from the arch, down the path that has changed, that was one desert and fine sand.  Hours ago was she among a field of bones, reflecting on that which was not a memory, but a dream, a glimpse into a different mind and a different place, and now she’s here where the sky is not blazing, and the very atmosphere does not impose.  But she’ll be damned if she’s foolish, if she allows herself to be taken advantage of by a realm that has no definitive state, no sense of singular direction or importance.

_You wanted to understand_

Frowning, she hesitates, and curses softly under her breath before turning to take her surroundings in once more.  Walls.  Just walls, and stone, weak plant life and vegetation crawling and creeping from cracks and chasms.  Dry is the air, yet not so as the desert plane she’d walked from that reminded her so dreadfully of the arid and desolate Jakku.  She lifts her head, eyes seeking where there should be sky, yet there are just grey clouds, swirling and flickering, as though bearing distant storms that have not yet reached these parts. 

What is there to understand in a path of relentless stone?  Her heart says _labyrinth_ , but all she’s seen is this corridor, this one road that’s carved from time and rock, not quite caging her in but imposing upon her subconsciousness a real and depraving sense of isolation and doom, gnawing at her resolve, her patience, and her will with an icy maw.  What is there to make of whispers and memories that only seek to taunt her, flooding her with a cacophony of sensations, perhaps in some effort to cripple her again as it had in the desert?

_Close your eyes—feel it_

_Feel_

Fine.

A moment of pause before she obeys, and Rey breathes slowly, deeply, her fingers curling once more to fists despite the pain that hums through her fingers and her palms, creeping like fire in her veins.  Up through her wrists and her arms until it meets the dull ache in her shoulders, the strain through her neck and her back.  Through her hips and down her legs until the tips of her toes wiggle in her boots, tingling with the flurry.  Where for the last several hours, or even days, have been nothing but cold, unsettling, her body flushed and sweaty, the heat that courses now through her is the greatest comfort, like the sunlight on Ahch To, or the fresh air of Takodana. 

Simpler places of a simpler time, where her understanding of the world might have been different, where she felt hopeful, instead of fearful, instead of isolated.  Eyes still closed, Rey clenches her jaw as she inhales again, curling her fingers tighter still as she presses that growing warmth through herself, something that must surely be that electricity from the clouds, this time crackling faintly along her skin.  The dark of her mind clears, clarifying, opening like smoke blown from a screen to see the spaces between the rocks, the moss and the vines that cling to the crevices from which they grow. 

_Now, what do you see?_

Life, she’s reminded.  Death, and decay, to grow new life.  A balance of warm, and cold, peace and violence.  Instead of Ahch To, she sees the pond under the silver moonlight, ripple with a breath, disturbing the waves that were once solid and firm.  She sees the desert once more, the dust grinding finer and finer into powder, the sun-bleached skeletons sinking into the softened plane, disappearing into the chasms that are created.  There is a bog, rolling with thick steam but a foot off the swampy ground, sludge and mud churning as snake-skinned creatures skitter with blinded eyes into the depths once again.  And at last, a spring, clusters of salt and minerals floating in pale blue pools, crystals gleaming along edges that fade out into fog.

And the labyrinth, center of it all, these places serving as the four corners around it.

 _Higher_ , she tells herself, cheek twitching in concentration as her fingers tighten further, nails pinching crescents into the cuts that already littler her palms.  The fire in her veins pulses with her heartbeat, a steady drumming in her ears as sees the stones begin to shift, begin to sink, until she can see the tops of the walls within which she stands, the arch but a handful of feet above her now.  Climbing, though through the midst of her focus, Rey can still feel the solid path beneath her feet, grounding her, flashes of arcing, wispy light humming under her boots, sinking into the spaces between the stones around her. 

High, high up her vision takes her until she sees the spiral of the labyrinth, laid out in grey stone.  Patches are shrouded in fog, rolling between the paths and around the corners, shifting and snaking its way through like a living thing.  _Careful of that,_ a whisper teases her ear as her fingers slowly begin to uncurl at her sides, a fresh drop of blood rolling down a finger of her right hand, breaking off and splatting against the stone below.

Pressed forward, her vision takes her across the stones, across the twisting and writhing walls, chaotic in their patterns.  Her mind takes it in, an effort to process and understand the curvature that she must eventually following, but it begins to blur, out of focus the faster she moves along.  There are openings that lead to nowhere, courtyards that bear wells and gardens, crumbled and long since dead, unattended as she’s raised up more, and more, the air frigid and sharp.

Caught in the center of this massive place is a single structure, with a dome for its roof, battered and broken in places.  It stands, defiant despite the evidence of battle and siege, iron doors bent and hanging from stone pillars, cracked open just enough for a body, perhaps two—shoulder to shoulder. 

_Go_

Reaching for it, Rey feels the wind whip, etchings coming into view along the iron doors, the mark of the Jedi religion, the devastating Sith order.  The doors screech, opening wide with a mouth of black shadow as a force sends her back again.

Gasping, she’s thrust back into herself, trembling as though shocked, or shoved, the pressure of energy and hands still coursing under the skin and fabric of her shoulders, her chest.  Her legs, locked in her determination, fail her, and she falls.  Landing flat on her back with a cry, the cold of the cobblestone path beneath her leaches at the warmth of her flesh.  Her head throbs, a terribly agony of white hot shrieking, eviscerating fire behind her eyes and between her ears.  Bringing her hands to her face, she covers her vision, clenching her jaw as she fights the urge to be sick.

What pain this is that she’s suffered once before, aloft in a red room with an obsidian floor.

And yet…  Where once dull greys and pale slates were only accompanied by thick, green and beige moss and gnarled vines, now there are… pulses, flashes of color.  Things that shift, move, flaring with light blue traces of energy wrapped around them like shields.  They skitter and crawl, fleeing from her presence before sinking down into the cracks, disappearing beyond that which she can see.  A perturbing and vile discovery, as her face remains covered, her eyes screwed shut for a long moment more as her body shivers, wracked with the weight of exhaustion.

With timed and careful breathing, the nausea comes to pass, the blaze in her bones dulling to a moderate singe.  Blinking slowly behind her hands, Rey draws another long breath before lowering her palms from her face, taking in the grey skies above her.  She need not look to the walls, or the ground below, to know that the lights are gone, and the warmth that had burned under her skin now settles in her core, like a pilot light kept safe in the hollow of her body.

Fresh blood marks her hands where her nails had dug into the cuts, opening the wounds once more.  Gazing upon her skin, she sees in her mind the snow touched forest of Starkiller base, scattered with flecks of blood beside a heavy black boot.

_What did you do?_

Lifting her head slowly, Rey looks to see Kylo standing again some ten paces away from her, his eyes wide and narrowed as he lingers in the center of the path.  Wincing, she shivers as she sits up, using the sides of her bleeding hands instead of the palms themselves.  Everything aches, a weariness sinking so deep into her bones that they feel brittle, weak, as though any moment or effort more than this will cause her to fall apart and collapse again.

“I…” she begins, stammering weakly as she wipes a bit of sweat from her brow, unintentionally smearing blood above her eye.  “I just…”

 _I felt you,_ he whispers, shoulders slumped as he takes a step closer.  _I couldn’t see you, but I didn’t need to.  You were— everywhere._

“I’m surprised you’re not chastising me instead,” she grumbles, rolling onto her knees, crying out a little as her bones grind, muscles twitching in her effort to stand.  She can feel Kylo’s gaze on her as she leans against the wall, panting softly.  “Effort and strain, and all that.”

_Forgive me for being…impressed._

Raising a brow, she glances over her arm at him, yet impressed is not the word that she would use to describe the expression writ across his face.  There’s too much tenderness in the depths of his brown eyes, his mouth slack, lips parted in a breath that she cannot hear but would swear by all the same.  Less of the shock from the first time she breached his mind.  No, this is Starkiller all over again, when she called the saber to her hand despite his power and his insistence. 

This is awe.

“What did you mean _everywhere_?”  She asks, using the wall for balance as she inspects her right hand first.  Some of the cuts are deeper, longer now, longer than her nails would have been.  Unless she’d moved her fingers, these could not have widened on their own.

 _The Force is an energy, a life of its own that surrounds and binds all other living things.  It is its own entity, bears its own signature, just as those of us who are Force sensitive, Force users, have our own signature._   Kylo says, the words coming with such ease that she can only suppose he’s heard and said these same teachings half a hundred times or more.  _It was not the Force I felt changing, observing, moving through everything.  It was you.  Just you._

“You’re daft,” she groans, pushing weakly off the wall for but a heartbeat before her head spins again, and she collapses back against it.

_You went too far.  You’re weak._

She huffs, shaking her head a little as bitterness floods her tongue.  “Thanks for that.”

_You know I didn’t mean like that._

Sighing deeply, Rey swallows the lump in her throat as she looks to him again.  He’s closer now, having taken another silent step forward, his eyes roving over with the same intensity as most every other time he’s looked at her—Takodana, Starkiller, the lift leading up to the red throne room of the _Supremacy_.  What hope had been in her when she looked back at him, then, professing with conviction that he would turn, that he would not bow before Snoke.

But… he didn’t, did he?  Not at the end.  He played his master, pretending to prepare to kill her when really he aimed the saber to the Supreme Leader instead.  Did he not fulfill exactly what she had said?

Yes.  And no.

 _No_.  So her heart hardens, disappointment curdling her blood for the briefest of moments as she averts her eyes from his, resting her head against her arm, the wall cold beneath her skin. 

_You need to rest._

“It’s not safe,” Rey replies, breathing slowly.  “There’s… there’s a creature here.  I couldn’t see what it was, exactly, but there’s something here, and I can’t stop.”

_You aren’t in the desert anymore._

“No,” she says simply, pushing from the wall once more.  Everything hurts, but she bares her teeth against it, and shambles along anyway, her fingers still skimming the wall in the event she needs its support.

_Your stubbornness may be the death of you_

She doesn’t even hesitate, wincing as the ache resonates deeper into every inch of her, flaring with each step.  “There are worse things to die by.”


	5. - V -

_There are worse things to die by_

He watches her walk, bloodied and bruised tips of her fingers trailing along what he can only guess is a wall or a rail, keeping steady the pace of her step and her balance.  From his place, he only sees her, until he blinks and the pulsing in his soul ceases, and her image vanishes from view.

Exhaling a heavy, shuddered breath, Kylo stares long and hard to the place where Rey had lingered just a moment before.  He knows she’s not here, not in this part of the realm they are isolated within, but his heart and his mind care not for the difference.  Her image is so clear, the song of her voice perfect and pure, with only the faintest of echoes to whisper around her words, an effect of their Bond.

The Bond that Snoke claimed to have created. 

_It was I who bridged your minds_

Clenching his jaw, he looks away from the hollow between two rotting tree trunks, bending and twisting into one another like an arch, their spindly and creaking branches twitching with a breeze that is not even strong enough to touch his face.  Unblinking, he glares at this opening, breath slow and steadying.  It is through there she vanished, through there he knows that even if he follows, he will not see her again.  Not here, anyway.

Though, wherever she is now, there will be hell to pay for the damage wrought upon her.  Bloodied hands and a battered body, he aches just reminiscing on the sight alone, the memory haunting him as he lowers his gaze to the mush bog floor beneath his boots, steam billowing and curling around his ankles.  He doesn’t like seeing her that way—injured, beaten, broken, smears of dirt and dust darkening her freckled cream skin, her legs lashed as though having walked through glass, her hands wrecked as if having grabbed and held to barbed wire. 

A man of so many scars, and the pride he’s taken in each of them, yet he cannot stand to see her hurt.

Hissing softly, Kylo curls his hands into fists, the leather of his gloves squeaking faintly with the stress as he moves across the rounded dirt of the swamp, keeping clear of the blackened, bubbling waters, the ropes of twisted vine and leaves hanging from faded willow trees and sinking down into the sludge.  There are enough gurgling and churning sounds to suggest that there’s something more here than just his own presence, and so keeping his distance from the edges is favorable at the very least. 

Head bowed low, Kylo minds his heavy footfalls as he skirts around a few trees, fallen and decaying logs soaked in black water and grime.  Grimacing, he brings the back of his wrist to his nose and his mouth, blocking the sulfuric and bitter stench of the swamp.  The fibers of his coat can only do so much without also suffocating him, so he braces momentarily against a sturdy enough branch, peering about at the grey and dismal space of his surroundings.

He woke up in this place, propped against a tree, his head pounding terribly.  The light hasn’t changed, a still and crawling silver-smoke that he cannot determine as dawn or dusk.  Hissing and whispers shift between branches and vines, the waters bubbling along the shores of mud and decomposing plant life.  How he, or Rey for that matter, came, he hasn’t quite determined the truth just yet, though he can only assume it had.. it had to do with the Force.

With the saber.  In Snoke’s throne room.  He wanted her to join him, _begged_ her to do so, and… and he thought she was reaching for him, just as she had from across the galaxy.  He thought, doing everything possible not to see into her mind, not to invade her so carelessly despite the strength of their Bond, the clarity with which existence had become since being so close to her, that she would accept.  He hoped. 

He still—

Trembling, his left hand curls and uncurls, the right reaching on impulse for his belt, for his cross-guarded saber.

But his fingers skim only thick padded leather, and an empty clip.  There is no saber, just as he wonders that Rey might be without, as well.

_Rey_

There are a hundred things that take him at once, pulling at heartstrings so frayed from actions for which he has no excuse, no justification, beyond blind hope and foul teaching.  Gritting his teeth, Kylo looks down at his gloved hands again, listening to the creak of leather as he flexes them slowly, carefully, palms covered and protected, but he cannot help seeing the flash of her hands, lacerated and raw, dripping blood.

His hands should look like that, not hers.  And he remembers, once, so long ago now that the memory itself is but a haze, the proof long since healed over, a time where his hands _did_ look just the same.  Cut and burned from training, from abuses of the Force undeniably gnawing and tearing apart his corporeal self, ripping wide the fresh wounds endured early in life through the days on Starkiller Base. 

But that it’s _not_ him, now, but _her_ is… dangerous. 

_She is strong with the Force—untrained, but stronger than she knows_

Biting the inside of his cheek, Kylo moves along, boots sinking here and there into wet dirt and sludge, blackened and green tar-like algae sticks to the leather of his soles, making future steps heavier and harder to maintain.  He presses onward, despite this, uncaring that his thighs begin to ache with the strain, that he has to grip the sturdier looking trunks and branches to haul himself out when his foot gets molded into place in the ground. 

He had felt her.  So strong, so clearly, but he felt her power, her strength, the resolve she called within herself to reach out and touch _everything_.  Her grasp is incredible, though, the image of herself, and the purity of her signature being far more than their Bond allows; for even what little he is aware of with such connections, there’s much more to learn to cement it further between them, and within themselves.  Legends and teachings painted pictures for him of a tangible thread that could be seen within the Force, a band that tangles and tethers the very souls of two individuals, binding them as one for an eternity.  Unbreakable, as it’s intended to be, save for Death.

Yet even Death cannot deter some things.

All the same, he had _felt_ her.  Pride can only take him so far for admiration in a woman, in a student so young, so new to the power she possesses, before the cold and unrelenting tide of reality must be addressed.  Untrained, and unsure of what limitations are before her until she becomes stronger, capable of shaping and guiding the energy within her, she could stretch herself too thin, accomplish too much until she _literally_ tears herself to pieces.

He thinks of her hands again, the weakness she displayed when she tried to walk on without him.

_Be careful_

He doubts she’ll hear him, or acknowledge the fleeting hope he sends across the great divide between them, eyes scanning through the bramble of vines and muck leaves clinging to skeletal branches, barely clinging to the last shreds of their lives.  He can see the life, the Light of this place flickering, though it is not Darkness that threatens it, but emptiness.  A lack of the Force fueling this part.  What will become of it all when it fades, his gut insists that the does not want to know.

He needs to get out of here, and soon.

_How did you do it?_ he thinks to himself, looking ahead once more.  _How did you leave the desert that you said was like Jakku_?

His mind whispers _Walk_ , his footsteps occasionally sinking and sticking a bit too much for his liking, but he keeps his attention forward, intent on obeying this strange command that should petrify but instead encourages.  All around, the swamp stretches on, disappearing in billowing fog and grey nothingness, the furthest reach that he can detect roughly a hundred yards away, before—emptiness.

Humming, he takes a peek over his shoulder, finding his footsteps sloughing through the muck, the wispy blanket of mist clinging to tree trunks and rotting roots, a shift in the water nearby that churns and bubbles briefly, until stillness takes it as surely as everything else.

Feeling a surge of warmth gathering through his chest and spreading along his torso, Kylo hurries onward and ahead still, nothing familiar coming to mind but an urgency to reach the end of… _something_.  Evermore, the heat creeps up into his throat and cups the back of his head, akin to fingers stroking his hair and laying him down to rest.  In his subconscious mind, Kylo finds soft golden light, a nursery on some planet he doesn’t remember, a woman’s gentle voice humming a lullaby in his childish ear.

That voice…

It’s been years since he heard it last, having spent far too long shutting out what pleasantries he might have once clung to, bent and manipulated to make way for Darkness, for power, for the legacy that his family name and blood bore him.  Twisted for promises, for satisfaction, for _purpose_ that he now sees, recognizes fully, as carefully crafted denial, a systematic obliteration of all he wanted, all he gave a _damn_ for…

Mid-step, Kylo falters, the corners of his eyes stinging briefly as he stares into nothing, recalling one of his earliest childhood memories—earlier than most can even fathom, and yet…  He knows it so perfectly, so intimately.

His mother—Leia—cradling his infant self in her arms, his head resting on her chest as she sang a quiet and beautiful song she would later tell him was fracture of a lullaby from Naboo.  Sunlight streams through pale cream curtains of a nearby open window, the afternoon glowing with summer promise in the dark chestnut of her hair, her eyes closed.  She smiles as she sings, rocking her baby boy with tenderness as the door across the room opens again.

Kylo turns his attention within the memory, seeing the young and less-hardened visage of Han Solo, hair not yet grey, face not yet old or tired.  The tunic’s top three buttons undone, his vest a little dusty along the hem near the belt he tucks his blaster into, but otherwise impeccable for a smuggler, a scoundrel, a commander.

A shudder ripples through his body as he reflects upon the long and truly lost sweetness this moment, the swamp shifting and bubbling around his physical self, light beginning to streak between a cluster of trees a dozen yards in front of him.  A moment of pause has him lingering, heart aching between his lungs as he watches his parents—people who are no older then as he is now, cradling their young and only son, proud and loving.

Tearing himself away, Kylo clenches his jaw as he stomps forward, leaving behind the shadow of Han Solo kissing his mother’s forehead, before the warmth touches his own infant brow, a hand coming to his back both in vision and in sensation, fingers gracing his skin through the thick wool and leather of his clothes.

_Hey, kid_

Teeth bared and breath coming heavy and hard, Kylo knocks a few of the vines from his path, boots splashing through shallow and muddy waters.  His fingers rake and claw against brittle tree branches, bringing them down in a rolling fury as tears cling to the corners of his eyes, threatening with insistence to breach and roll down his face.  Huffing, he bows his head and barrels onward.  Before him, the light brightens, burning his eyes even as he shuts them to the glow, raising a hand to shield his face.

The stench of the swamp fades, his body twitching and pulsing with exertion as the realm warps, shifting and pulling around him before stopping, abating.  Lowering his hand, Kylo looks up to find walls of stone, ten or more feet tall, guiding down a single path.


	6. - VI -

Rey finds as she continues to traipse through the stone-walled paths that, unlike the moonlit pond and the bone desert, the labyrinth constantly… _changes_.  Whether the stones themselves, some yards away and in another direction, crumble and rotate, or day suddenly becomes night by turning a corner, or dry and brittle heat turns to bitter cold, there is no hour where something does not occur.  More often than not, she keeps her arms wrapped around herself, her head bowed but eyes looking up, taking in all that she can, in some desperate effort to remain as unsurprised when the plane decides to be a _kriffing_ mess.

Yet even that attempt feels futile at best.  It’s not so much that the circumstances mold into something new instantaneously, no—rather, she will find herself dragging her boots, her eyes half-shut and fluttering as freezing winds wrack around her body, carving through her hair and her clothes, before they cease and desist, the sky brightens, and the heat that floods her is as if the sun itself is directly upon her, beaming its energy into her bones.  And there is no turning back, no staying within one climate or shadow, she’s tried.

Reflecting on her visions of the labyrinth as frequently as she can, Rey wanders through the maze of stone, recalling some of the bends and curves, the distant stretch that feels like an opposite corner where that writhing mass of fog and smoke snaked between the paths, pulsing and twitching.  A vicious thing it had seemed to be, crawling along in anticipation of bait, of something to play with, something to devour.

Surely, it was the opposite corner from where she stands now…

Shivering, Rey shambles onward, exhausted and worn, cold sweat and filth clinging to her skin, her hands curled into fists with her arms wrapped tight around her body.  Pain comes in waves, her fingers aching and her palms burning, the radiating heat searing through her wrists and along her forearms as she stumbles, brushing against a bit of ragged rock jutting from the wall nearby.

A grimace pulls at her mouth, her eyes screwing shut briefly as she chokes on a sob, agony humming down in her very bones.  Yet insistence burrows into her soul and says _Don’t stop_ , for it must mean that stopping is the end of her, the end of whatever all of this is.  And she can’t quit now; she can’t give up and die when she is lost somewhere that isn’t home, somewhere that isn’t the plane she’s meant to be on, among the people she’s meant to be with.

_You don’t belong in this story.  You come from nothing.  You’re nothing_.

Hesitating, Rey stares out at the long path of stone ahead of her, leading toward another arch, a tunnel—or perhaps a hallway, she can’t be sure.  The entrance is dark, moaning with a wind she doesn’t feel as sunlight continues to pour and blister across her back, sweat soaking through her clothes anew.  How she can continue like this, perspiring and pressing onward despite there being no food, no water, is… impossible. 

She shouldn’t trust the tunnel, the opening that beckons before her.  But it would be a glimpse of shadow, of shade, comfort and cooling her from the overbearing blaze of light above her.  Perhaps it would be a token of shelter, a place she can rest and ease the pain currently grinding her bones to dust inside her body.  Hell, it’s the first change she’s seen that isn’t just temperamental weather in Maker knows how long, and—

And there are tears in her eyes at all of this, her chin trembling as she unwinds and looks down at her hands once more.  Bloodied, bruised, open cuts looking gnarled and angry, though she can’t detect or feel any signs of infection.  _At least there’s that_.  The one good thing before her in this cacophony of _wrong_.

Breathing slowly, she takes one step, and then another, and another until she dips under the dark arch of the tunnel that leads to… _somewhere_ , nowhere, she’s not entirely certain, nor can she bring herself to _care_.  It’s something different, something obscured from the heat of the sun overhead, or the bitter cold of a winter that bites too much like the forest on Starkiller Base. 

_Be careful_

It’s a whisper, nothing more.  Tickling the shell of her ear with but a breath, Rey falters just inside the tunnel, the garish light of the day behind her illuminating a handful of paces in front of her, the shadow connected to her feet melting into the dark ahead.  Shivering again, she frowns, glancing over her shoulder to see the path she’s walked, the walls her fingers traced, the stone that she rammed her shoulder into when her feet failed her.

Be careful?  What reason beyond her own foolishness would she need to be careful, beyond the shape creeping around the corners she witnessed when her vision took hold?  A moment passes with nothing more, other than the pulsing her palms, and she lowers her gaze to them once more.  Angry, crimson streaks borne from cuts and smears of blood.  Her fingers twitch, curling into fists once more as heat hums in her veins.

_Be careful_

All right.  All right.

Deeper into the dark she ventures, the shadows blocking light and heat, and so chills race along her spine.  Reaching out, she trails the side of her fist against the wall, following it as her eyes work to adjust to this shift.  Blindness momentarily seizes her, and she pauses in her stride to breathe, to quell the churning flood of _wait, stop, stop, no, this is too far, this is too much, go back, go back_!

“Stop,” she tells herself, shaking her head as pressure wells around her ears, between her temples.  Recognizing it, she swallows, feeling the _pop_ before she lifts her head again.  Pausing, she inhales slowly, a prickling and surprisingly comforting sensation crawling under her skin to the back of her neck.  “You’re closer than you were before.”

_I feel it, too_ , he says, his image bright and clear before her despite the darkness of the tunnel.  _Where are you?_

“Some—tunnel, I don’t know.  It’s part of this.. this maze, this labyrinth.”

_Was it dark before you went into the tunnel?_   Kylo continues, his voice soft as his eyes dart around.  He’s pale, paler than she’s seen him, with shadows carving across his face.  His body moves, walking beside her, though she knows his path is different from hers. 

“No,” Rey admits, continuing to brush her hand along the stone as her eyes slowly take in the dark, and ignore the glow of pale blue that seems to flicker around his image.  “It was bright, like daytime.  Cloudless.”

_I see moonlight._  

“I’ve seen that, too.  It changes.”

_Changes?_   He pauses, his face momentarily lost as his eyes wander, roving up and around where he stands.  Looking.  Understanding.  _I see_.

“Any insight to share?”  Rey breathes, leaning against the wall momentarily to catch her breath.  Her thighs still ache from trudging through sand, through bones.  Her calves burn, cut and scraped up as though having tumbled through bramble bushes.  It pales to her hands, naturally, and she opens a palm to inspect it, seeing barely more than a shadow of cuts, the smell of iron strong and bitter.

_None,_ Kylo confesses, frowning some as his attention seems to shift toward her.  _Let me see_.

“It’s fine,” Rey hisses quietly, closing her hand again. 

_Rey,_ he tries, brow furrowing deeper still.  Something in her chest kicks, unforgiving and cold, a gnawing trepidation drawing from the reservoir of doubt and disappointment.  Still, though, a heartbeat passes as he holds her gaze, and Rey reaches out, unfolding her hand to show him her palm. 

What she expects is nothing.  Possibly the heavy weight of his dark stare to find her hand, the same kind of distress that twitches under her skin to manifest from his gaze, knowing and pleading.  Chastising, as she’d remarked before, for putting too much of herself into something she knows _nothing_ about. Instead, he looks at her hand, stepping a touch closer, his gloved fingers raising briefly as if to touch, to hold, but they don’t.  Her breath hisses between her teeth, unintentionally sharp, distrusting, but his eyes do not leave her palm. 

_You need to be more careful_ , he says.  Blinking, Rey regards him with caution, a frown pulling at her lips as she studies his face.  He looks tired, weary from that which she may never know.  His hair frames his cheeks and his jaw, limp and damp at the ends with sweat, the scar carving across his eye and his cheek like a slow-healing chasm, slowly pressing inward again. 

“Of what?”  She muses at last, the edges of her words shaking as his brown eyes flick up and find hers. 

_The Force_ , Kylo breathes, the words so soft she almost feels them touching her skin.  _You don’t know yet how to control it.  Push too hard, too much, it’ll tear you apart._

Clenching her jaw, Rey glances down to her hand again, to the cuts she can only barely see, the blood that is stained and dried across her skin. 

“I tried learning,” she mumbles, lifting her attention to him once more.  He’s exactly where he stopped, tall and imposing, yet he feels _nearer_.  “I tried—I tried going to someone I thought could help me.”

_Skywalker,_ he whispers.  _And he failed you_.

“He didn’t—” Rey sneers, feeling those _kriffing_ tears in her eyes again, sourness burning up through her throat and into her mouth, raging flooding across her tongue as that flame inside her soul flares under her skin.  “He didn’t _fail_ me.”

_Rey_ , Kylo says, body moving and inching closer though soundless, echoless in his step despite the ringing of her words through the tunnel.  Faltering, she presses her back hard against the stone wall, looking up at him as his eyes rove over her face.  A nudge, something soft and warm at her temples, beckoning for a release, a resolve—

“Don’t,” she warns, pressing back on him, watching his image step away.  Just a foot, or so, but he does. 

_I’m trying to help_. 

“Help by finding a way out of here, whatever this is.”  Her heart pounds, a dull hum pulsing between her ears, mimicking that which presently wracks between her lungs, her ribs.  His eyes soften, possibly sorrowful as his jaw moves, molding and swallowing words that his mouth refuses to utter. 

_It’ll be easier if we find each other first,_ he whispers, looking away from her again to take in the surroundings she cannot see.  But… but in the closeness, the narrowing edges of the tunnel laid out before her, she feels a cool and gentle breeze come rolling from his visage.  His hands curl, clenching into fists momentarily, the leather creaking _ever_ so faintly. 

Would it be easier, though?  To look up into the true face instead of this projection?  To look into those eyes that she swore pleaded and begged, filling with tears as he reached for her?  The tether that holds them together has, whether for better or for worse, she’s yet to consider, proven to be of their own machinations, their own signatures bending and binding into one.  Would it be easier to feel that hum, that sense of power and pride that rolls off those shoulders in droves, wash over her physically?  To stand and survive this place with the person who knows her better than—

But if he knew her… he wouldn’t have—

_You don’t think that’s a good idea_? 

Her eyes snap from his hands to his face, her pulse wavering in her ears, off-kilter and hollow in its weight.  Oh, but there’s an air of play in his eyes, the flicker of an upward curl at the corner of his mouth that threatens to stir something entirely different within her blood.  Haunting, though not demanding.

Saying nothing, Rey swallows the uncertainty of her thoughts, her heart, back into place where it belongs.  Suffocating on such fantasies will not serve her here, even as his quiet sigh shakes the air around her. 

_It would be wiser, then,_ he tries, choosing his words far more carefully this time as his eyes search hers.  _Resting in a place like this is proving to be impossible—you said it yourself, there’s something else here with us.  We can look out for each other, help each other.  Just as you said._

Just as she said—

_Ben… I’ll help you_

“So you can turn me?”  She gripes instead, eyes hard as another cool breeze tickles her legs, her face, a shiver rolling down her spine.  Between her lungs is a swelling, twisting and angry knot that threatens to break her, to shatter the bitterness that poisoned her the moment he asked her to join him.  “So you can convince me that letting _old_ things die and ruling the galaxy is best for both of us?”

There’s a flash in his gaze that pains her, the same disappointment and frustration gleaming like wildfire when he’d shouted, accused her of _still_ _holding on_.  Kylo huffs, shaking his head as he turns from her.  She can see the tension in his jaw, the clenched muscle that twitches from his throat through his cheek and into his temple, nostrils flaring with a breath that she doesn’t hear.  His image flickers, the pressure welling between her ears again.  Before he vanishes, his head moves in her direction, gaze firm but… apologetic, too.

_Be careful, Rey.  I’m not your enemy here._

And then he’s gone, in a blink and a pop, and the shiver that coils through Rey’s body is not one of cold.


	7. - VII -

The pop rings through Kylo's ears, his jaw clenching and unclenching briefly to clear the pressure, his temples pulsing briefly as he swallows and looks to where she had once stood, but a few breathes away.  Gone.  Of course she is.

Her eyes remain, though, burned in his mind; alight with a hard bitterness in her expression that roars like fire, ebbing at the edges of his soul, seared like the flesh of his face and shoulder, torn and wrecked from the tip of the saber.  Distrusting, and cautious, but not nearly so vicious as she’d been in the forest, among a blanket of snow and a crumbling bedrock. 

 _I am not your enemy,_ he thinks, as though somehow the words might find her again, might ease whatever discomfort still corrodes her resolve.  Potentially futile, yet he finds the determination to _try_ remaining, even with the echo of her words mimicking the beat of his heart.  His fingers curl, gloves creaking as he glances about the endless stretch of stone wall and path ahead.  The skies are churning, coiling with deep grey clouds and a breeze that carries with it the atmospheric sting of rain.  It sours his tongue, his cheeks tingling faintly as he swallows again, and again. 

Pushing forward, he keeps his head low, minding his steps over a handful of cracks that seem carved from more than time.  If he looks, he thinks he can see it, the shift within the rock.  There are… pulses, raw and relentless energy deep within those crevices that hum with something far denser and older than that of his late mentor, or the island of Ahch-To, and the Jedi temple he set fire to.  A life and a time that seem far longer ago than their true and recent nature.

Whatever this place, this plane of existence, within which they’ve been stranded—he and Rey—it is virtually ancient and, all the same, timeless.  Shifting in composition yet retaining in it something consistent, something powerful that flows, beckoning and reaching.  Its grasp, its truth, though, flees his touch, his yearning mind and wandering eyes, but there’s… there’s something.  A purpose.  An understanding to be found, a purpose to be fulfilled, he’s just got to reach it. 

Reach it—like trying to grab smoke with one’s bare hands.

But he’ll not find it without her, that much must be made clear.  Even if stubbornness would will him to press on and seek this knowledge on his own, an intellect having been instilled within him through rotting books and careful transcription to parchment, their Bond remains the same unyielding tether between their minds.  He _must_ find her before he seeks answers.  If nothing else, the insistence she bears to leave this plane serves him as well; they came here together, it seems unlikely that they would leave it separate.

He hesitates, if only for a moment, but he does so all the same, eyes staring off into grey and silver mass of cobblestone and slate in front of him.  What if they did, though, return separately?  What if she leaves first, finding a gate or a hole in the fabric of this realm, falling through and back to their universe, to the dark-floored throne room of the _Supremacy_?  What if he falls through, first, waking to find her not with him?  Would he have the means of coming back for her?  Would they be parted forever?  Would they only have the Bond that bridges their minds, a chance to speak, to touch through the will of the Force, yet forever and always knowing that it is not _the same_?

The thought alone, how obscure and desolate it may be in its trappings, coils around the hollow part of his core, snaking into something raw and unhinged, festering with such malicious grief that he nearly doubles over, gloved fingers clawing the stone wall of this twisting labyrinth, the very breath in his lungs stolen.  Panic sinks into his blood, his bones aching, as storm clouds roll overhead, crackling with lightning, flashing in the distance with the echo of warbled, sinister laughter.

No, he’ll not exist like that, tethered across separate universes, uncertain of whether they may chance crossing paths save for what their Bond may manifest of them to the other.  He’ll be damned if that is to be his destiny, bound to someone so strong, so alike to him in loneliness, in desperation, only to _never_ have her near again.

_Pathetic child_

He bites his tongue, breathing slowly as the words come back, his vision reddening for the most fleeting of moments.  Fleeting all the same, it exists in the core of him, in the depths of his mind, and so therefore it is endless, taunting and cold.  A shadow creeps, unseen, pressing into the back of his mind with hooked fingers, a clawed vice digging into his memory and pulling fresh what occurred only hours before yet feels so far away.  Hissing words of a viper, scathed from flames of a time and a tragedy he’ll never know, nor care for, speaking of _stoking Ren’s conflicted soul_ — _I knew he was not strong enough to hide it from you._

No… he supposes not.

Iron twinges in his mouth as he breathes around the thick of his tongue, trembling in effort to suppress the memory.  The moment had stung him—his mentor taking credit for their Bond, warping its intent, its purpose, to be a knife in the heart of the girl, Snoke’s hand on her face where once his own had hovered, unwilling to touch but yearning for just that.  _This is something else_ , he’d told her, but that _something_ had not been the influence of the scarred figure—no, he would’ve known the presence of that vindictive spirit.  _She_ would’ve known.

_And you were not wise enough to resist the bait_

No.  Snoke was wrong.  He has to hold onto that much, if only for his own sanity.  What else is there for him if not this—the tether that, should he focus, should he close his eyes and remember his training, remember the tutelage of man, a mentor, who _tried_ and _failed_ —

He would see it, he knows.  A Force, a balance between all things.  The tension that binds all living creatures, all matter, all of life and death, him… and her.

Opening his eyes again, Kylo finds the path that once lay before him, a straight line that disappeared into darkness, now opens.  Hardly any wider than it was before, but it stretches to something new.  The walls crawl high overhead, curling in to craft a tunnel, the entry a maw of crumbled stone and dried moss.  Shadow carves at the mouth of the opening, beckoning with promise of shelter as the skies rumble once more, pulsing with storms that whip through his hair, his clothes, drops of rain beginning to come down in a steadily building trickle.

Biting the inside of his cheek, now, his boots fall heavy and hard against the stone, not quite the conviction of intimidation in his gait, but a persistence to follow, to seek, and to find.  Didn’t she say she traversed into a tunnel, into the dark? 

The tops of his shoulders and his head are damp as he ducks under the curve of the tunnel, the walls smelling of dry dirt and dust.  Blinking, he takes a moment for his eyes to adjust, what silver light that exists outside in the rain doing little at best to illuminate his journey ahead.  He rests a hand against the wall, eyes fluttering as he looks down into the dirt that smears across the stone. 

Disturbed.  Freshly, so.  Staring hard upon the space between his boots, he can see her footprints, and his heart gives a kick to his ribs.

“Rey,” his whispers, the weight of her name familiar and sweet on his tongue.  A simple thing, the single syllable having only been felt perhaps once or twice before, yet it resounds within his mouth, his mind, as though etched there, a permanent fixture as certain as his teeth, the bones of his body, the Force holding him together and guiding him along. 

Swallowing thickly, he takes a moment to close his eyes and breathe, bringing into him the dirt, the rain, the grit of stone and the musk of leather and wool, his own body and blood burning in his mouth.  And beyond that, something more, something so smooth and clear, pulsing with the beating of his heart, twining around his core, his fingers, his heart.

No.  Snoke was wrong.

Stepping forward into the shadow again, he leaves behind the drumming of rain on rock, the rolling mist that peppers across the backs of his heels and his calves as he delves deeper into the tunnel, his fingers skimming against the wall to his right.  Dark though the walk forward may be, he keeps his head high, shoulders back.

_This didn’t go on forever, I knew it was leading somewhere—that at the end it would show me what I came to see_

“Where are you taking me?”  He asks, frowning just a touch as he feels his hand move briefly away from the stone, the wall curving.  Reaching out with his left, he finds the opposite end indeed curling, the right corner smooth like a cavern, bearing nothing of the sharp edges of the labyrinth behind him.

Breathing slowly, he keeps his fingers hovering over the surface of the wall beside him, eyes wavering to take in the dark.  There’s nothing, not even a shift in the shadows themselves, the void groaning low, exhausted.  Still, faltering and going back is hardly an option, and he’s long since taught himself to show no fear in the face of the darkness, but rather to accept it, embrace it as surely as the light.

 _No,_ he thinks.  He was taught to shun the light, to recoil from it, to find weakness in it, lest he find weakness in himself for seeking it.  The darkness would give him answers, the darkness would give him purpose, and in that purpose he would understand the true nature and depth of his destiny.  And in that destiny, he would know the will of the Force, and all that it could bring.

He did not seek the light—not intentionally.  Cling to the edges of his mind and his resolve it might have, he fought and bled and wept over the loss of it, pushing it out with every stretch of effort he could.  Yet it sought him, it found him, latched onto his heart and burrowed into his soul.  Perhaps he might have been able to shake it, with time and persistence, resolution found in his training. 

Perhaps with time he might have accepted the lesson that was meant to be found in killing Han Solo.  But he did not have time.  He did not give it to himself, and Snoke sure as ever would not have the patience for him to try.

_You’re just a child in a mask_

Hissing softly, Kylo stomps forward, steps echoing off the walls, the heavy leather sole of his boot grinding against dust and stone, the dry air foul against his throat.  The bitterness, he finds, is not of the ancient cobbled walls or the freshly walked path that he follows, but despair, and fury for a mentor that poked and prodded his young mind, fostering doubt and agitation into an already broken and confused heart.  A forgotten boy who could not see the love and good intent of his family until it was too late to acknowledge, until he was too far gone into commitment to a destiny that was not of his making, or of his tried and true choice.

His hand briefly comes to his side, to the haunted scar beneath the thick wool of his coat where the bowcaster had struck, held by a friend and figure of family as compassionate and endearing as his own parents had attempted to be in childhood.  Such a blow he shouldn’t have survived, but he did.  Through anger he channeled the pain, but it wasn’t enough.  He was weak—not for lack of skill or ambition, but from grief, from agony that he could not process behind blind fury and suffering.

_It’s just us, now—Han Solo can’t save you_

Lifting his gaze, he peers into the dark, snarling briefly as he burrows his hand into the stone wall, pushing from it with a growl.  Curse these memories, these deeds, curse these poisoned tragedies that _split his spirit to the bone_ , as it were.  Damn it all, if he could, his fingers clawing at a loose stone as he propels himself forward through the tunnel, hearing pebbles shift and clatter, dust kicking up under his boots.  His heart aches, pounding with a fervor that threatens to break beyond the mortal confines of his corporeal self, to leave him in the shambles that he surely must be made of, fragile and delicate, susceptible to collapse at the faintest of actions.

 _Let it all die,_ he thinks to himself, huffing between clenched teeth.  The past.  The future, even, if all that he has to look forward to is this—a shifting maze submerged in relentless darkness, unanswered promises and broken, failing words, a tether binding him to someone so close, yet so far away, who distrusts him with all the passion and aggression as the moment she’d struck him down in the snow-capped forest.

_Ben?_

Gasping, he pauses, scrambling to seek purchase against the wall, body caved in and trembling, buckled over at the waist as his hair tickles his cheeks.  Eyes wide, he sees nothing but black, the dark that consumed him as he stepped into the tunnel, the thundering rain and the silver light of the storm-rolled sky far behind him, now—so much that their cacophonous sounds are lost under the hammering of his own pulse.  Yet the whisper of his name rings with clarity, humming with a breath that brushes his ear, warm and kind.

“Rey?”  He says, lips barely moving.

_Ben_

“Where are you?”  He tries again, straightening against the rock, flattening himself against it.  Nothing else changes.  Desperation clouds his heart, though logic, reason, and far too many years dedicated to an understanding that still evades him insists that this is now their Bond, only his memories.  “Rey—”

He’ll chastise himself later for the way his throat quivers, voice breaking as he turns and—

There.  Where once there’d been nothing, now some hundred yards away is a beam of pale silver light.  An opening.  A way out. 

A way to her.


	8. - VIII -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recently edited

She’s wheezing, panic rushing under her skin and through her veins thicker than poison, flashes of fire and ice pulsing through her muscles as pumps her arms at her sides, the soles of her boots smacking hard against the stone of the labyrinth.  Brambles and bits of rock and moss fly by in a blur as she runs, tension gripping her core and gnawing at the edges of her mind.  Behind her, guttural hissing and screeching comes and goes in waves, sometimes so close to her ears that she feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, sweat streaming down her brow as she shrieks, and ducks around another corner. 

Whatever it is, the creature or the entity that exists in the mist, twisting and writhing, goes slamming into a wall she just hurried past, stones crumbling and smashing to rubble as the air around her seems to shiver and shake.  Breathless, she presses onward, sucking shallow gulps between her teeth, daring not even for a heartbeat to glance over her shoulder; no matter of curiosity can quell what fear as wrought upon her.  For that, alone, the howling of glass-churned _agony_ is convincing enough that the pursuit remains relentless. 

Her legs burn, the muscles of her thighs twitching beneath her trousers as she sprints down the long and open path, hearing rhythmic sounds of impact, like a beast leaping from one side of the labyrinth to the other.  _Left, skitter-skitter, right, skitter-skitter, left again…_ Sides aching, the lungs themselves threatening to fail her, her heart races with such fervor that she feels it in her throat, on her tongue, behind her teeth, bones rattling with every move.  On and on, she passes only stone, only endless straight lines and bits of moss, the dull grey of the sky overheard merely painting the world in a smear of morbid endlessness.

There’s another hiss, curdling her spit and her blood, something vicious and cold creeping, reaching, clawing toward the back of her neck as the wall to her right opens up in a blink, and she lunges through it.  The touch grates, desperate to seek purchase in her skin as she twists just out of reach.  Catching but another quick glimpse of the _thing_ , its malevolent figure spindly like a krykna but thin, gangling, slithering like a snake.  Gasping, Rey stumbles briefly against the wall, nearly collapsing to her hands and knees as she turns and runs again down the new-made path. 

It had all happened so quickly—she had gone through the opening at the end of the tunnel, the darkness fading away in a flash, and she was left out in an open courtyard with half a dozen new paths laid out before her within the stone ring.  The sun had been shining, then, the skies cloudless and pale blue where once had been fading grey and the thick promise of rainfall, and when she had turned to look behind her, the tunnel had been replaced by nothing.  Just a wall of stone and rock, cobbled, flecked in dust and moss, as though it had always stood there. 

Having since accepted that the labyrinth changes, the momentary realization of the tunnel being gone did not surprise her, nor concern her.  Unbothered save for the need to move on, to seek answers, she had taken the third path to the left, almost directly across from where she’d stood, thinking perhaps that moving _straight_ might be helpful, might glean some further insight into the vision she’d seen before.  That maybe the deeper she ventured into the labyrinth itself, the closer she would get to the center, the closer she would be to the doors she remembers, hanging off their hinges, beckoning her. 

The silence should have been a warning, but save for her own breathing and the occasional whisper of his voice, there had been nothing else.  No birds, no small creatures, nothing but her footsteps and her heartbeat.  Not even the dull and echoing pop of her counterpart’s presence seemed to occur, where once she might have anticipated it in such a moment of calm.

Having rounded a corner, Rey had stopped, her eyes widening as she gazed upon the flickering, twitching mist.  Her breath had caught in her throat, the throbbing of her core burning so hot and bright that she nearly lost herself.  But she held firm, and still, staring at the mass that seemed only to bring _danger_.

It didn’t matter, though.  In her effort to back away, her heel skidded on a rock that, in hindsight, she does not remember seeing before.  Yet, isn’t it all the same?  Things that were there before suddenly vanish, and things that did not exist at all make themselves known, and present.  The creature reeled and turned on her, bellowing with such a wracking scream that her ears still ring, her bones vibrating from its intensity, and she’s been running every since. 

Even now, she races, the edges of her vision beginning to blur and darken, the lack of air and the suddenness of her exertion leaving her delirious.  Her legs are hot, sweat pouring down damn near every inch of her, wind whipping through her hair and her clothes.  Stones continue to crumble and break behind her, and against what judgement yet possibly remains in her mind, she glances quick over her shoulder, finding bits of rock and debris cluttering the path, yet the walls themselves remain… ominous, towering, and virtually untouched. 

A twist in her gut propels her forward, instinct burning in her throat with bile as she turns her attention forward again.  Ducking hard to the left, Rey narrowly avoids the creature lashing, mist ghosting against the place she’d just occupied, dust pluming around her ankles from ruined cobble.  Shrieking, she brings her arms around her head as something else smashes and breaks, pebbles raining down around her shoulders, a few pieces nicking the skin of her neck and her jaw.  More cuts, mores scrapes, and bruises, more trauma to add to that which already festers in her skin and her weary body.

Lifting her eyes, she digs deep and runs faster, choking on dust as she sees _him_ —or, rather, his Force image—up ahead.

 _Rey?!_   He calls, his voice echoing with the telltale pressure of their Bond in her mind, his eyes widening some as he looks behind her.  She knows he likely cannot see, cannot understand the ferocity with which she sprints toward him, wild-eyed fear written across her face.  The creature shrieks, and she watches him flinch, his gaze looming past her, his brow furrowed.

“ _Run!!_ ”  She screams, reaching instinctively for him, for his gloved hand.  A moment floods of her thinking that she won’t touch, she won’t be able to take hold of him and bring him with her, that he’s not in the danger she’s in because he’s not here, not really.  Truly, she may put him in more danger by lunging to him.  Still, she reaches, fingers outstretched as she snatches for his hand.

Were she not already breathless, she might gasp from the feeling of leather under her skin, his grip tightening around her palm as he takes off with her. 

 _What is it?_   He bellows, glancing over their shoulders as though to make sense of what she is running from.  In truth, though, even she cannot be certain, knowing only that it’s massive, shapeless, and seems to leave destruction in its wake. 

Gritting her teeth, and incapable of speaking, Rey charges ahead, tugging the black wool and leather clad Force user with her, every inch of her torso throbbing in agony as they maintain their sprint.  His legs are longer, he should be moving further head of her, but he seems to follow her pace, hair billowing around his shoulders as he side-eyes her, awaiting an answer she cannot give. 

 _I don’t know,_ she thinks, unable to spend the breath to scream over the tirade of crashing and hissing noises behind them. _I don’t know what it is, and I’m afraid._

 _Don’t be afraid,_ he says—a haunted and distant memory, to be certain—the words so soft and gentle despite the agitation coursing through her, flight pressing her further down the path as the walls continue to crush and crumble with another wave of horrific, visceral wailing making her ears ring, her eyes watering as she, too, cries out.  It’s agonizing, the intensity of the scream piercing under her skin, as if in some wild effort to claw and rip her apart from the inside out.  That same tingling, creeping sensation prickles across the back of her neck, sweat pouring down her face and blurring her vision.

It’s too much, though.  All of it.  Every piece of her is on fire beneath her skin, exertion claiming its last dredges of effort as the spread of her vision narrows more, and more, darkness closing in around the corners.  Desperate for reprieve, for breath, Rey digs her nails into the soft leather of his glove, pinching into the hefty meat of his palm, the ridges of his knuckles.  Clenching her jaw, she hisses, a sputtered cough clamping around her throat and eviscerating her will. 

She can’t… she can’t—

At her side, he glances over his shoulder again, though she does not see the way his eyes widen, horror crossing his face as she ducks her head, wheezing between grinding teeth.  Her muscles twitch and spasm, her hamstrings on the verge of seizing as her steps falter, the toe of her boot skidding against the stone.  Crying out, she bucks and trips, air rushing passed her face.  Squeezing her eyes shut, she waits for the slam, for the impact of her body to crumble against the ground, for the mist to swirl and consume her, to lacerate her to ribbons the way it seems to have with the walls and floor of the labyrinth. 

But it doesn’t come.  Nothing comes.  Choking, she opens her eyes, seeing the stone of the labyrinth floor, yes, the walls still towering overhead.  But she is suspended, held by an unseen grip that circles her chest and her waist, the feeling of leather having slipped from her grasp. 

Panting hard, ragged and weak, she lifts her head, turning to look over her shoulder to see him standing but a foot away, one hand outstretched to her and holding her in place, the other aloft, fingers spread and twitching.  His face is twisted into a snarl, focused, perhaps even _enraged_ , as he seems to keep the _creature_ at bay.  It beats and slams itself against an invisible wall, writhing and screaming all the wall, wisps of a fanged maw mouthing at nothing, ugly and sharp pincer-like claws scratching soundlessly.

“Ben,” she rasps, her body lowered to the floor as the hand reaching toward her relaxes.  The ground is cold to her hot and sweaty skin, a welcome relief despite the imminent danger of their circumstance.  Temporarily halted, but daunting, and she trembles behind him. 

 _Go_ , he chokes, a vein pulsing in his throat as he keeps his eyes forward. 

“How are you—”

 _Go, Rey!_   He shouts, not looking at her still.  Scrambling to her feet, her body protests, legs and sides aching, yet the instinct to survive has been and will always be embedded into her very soul.  Hesitating, she looks to the swirling grey mass, watching stones crumble and break around it as Ben digs his heels further in to the stones below, boot grating against rock as he flexes and pushes the creature back.  It’s but a handful of steps, but it’s distance nonetheless.

 _What did I say?_   He hisses, this time just turning his head enough to meet her gaze from his peripheral.  Wide, panicked, but determined all the same.  _Go.  Please_.

His name is but a whisper on her lips, breathless and lost.  Stumbling, Rey backpedals some ten paces, watching Ben’s fingers twitch and claw toward the wall he’s created, shoulders taut and knees bent almost into a crouch.  Strain swells with heat across his face, his skin flushed as he turns and looks away from her again, a tremor racing along his spine as his heels crush and sink into the stone path beneath his feet. 

Though the rush of stubbornness threatens to result in an abject refusal to leave, there is not enough strength in her to stand her ground with him.  Woefully, with a newly reawakened stab of shame that sears her chest, she goes.  Having only just regained enough breath to run down the corridor, making one sharp turn and then another, and another, Rey puts time and distance between herself and the creature, until the silence swallows her whole once more, and the shrieking and clawing of the mist is but a fading and terrible memory.

At once, the heat of everything folds around her, deafening silence thrumming in her ears, her skin flushed and soaked from fleeing, her clothes damp, the sting of salt burning the insides of her eyes.  One breath, and then another, gulped, and Rey stares back the way she came, waiting, and waiting, and waiting still for the shadow of him to come around the corner.  _Please_ , she finds herself begging, body wracked and worn as she gazes down the path, to the corners that disappear to somewhere else entirely.  _Come back…_

Only then does it dawn that the pressure in her head is gone, though the gentle hum of the tether still lingers around her soul, if a little… fractured.

 _Ben…_  

Tears prickle the corners of her eyes as something hot and sharp spears through her, her core burning with a wave of nausea that sours her mouth and leaves her heaving against the flat of the wall.  Her head spins, gravity funny and fickle as she squeezes her eyes shut, a scream welling in the depths of her throat and the back of her mouth.  Stupid, how could he be so stupid—

 _Here,_ her heart beats, a whisper in her ear that isn’t of her voice, making her core tremble.  _I’m still here._  

Her palms and her fingers ache, the cuts she’s endured pulsing angrily, though thankfully remain scabbed and unopened despite the exhaustion that currently leeches on her consciousness.  Pulse racing, Rey leans into the rock and moss, her head reeling as the tears flow freely down her face, dripping from her chin.  Everything hurts, down to the tips of her toes.  

Open and raw, like an exposed nerve, flooded with agony and bitterness, Rey feels her knees shake and give, her body sliding down the rock of the labyrinth wall as she collapses, the leather soles of her boots skidding against the bottom of the path.  Her lungs quiver, twitching with breath that does not fill or satisfy, a weight crushing into her chest as she tips her head back against the wall. 

“Ben,” she whispers, more tears rolling down her cheeks, before darkness closes around her vision, and weariness claims her.

 


	9. - IX -

Clumsy fingers claw at the edges of the stone, plucking bits of moss and dirt from the crevices as he slumps down to the floor.  His vision shifts and blurs, the edges twitching in and out of focus as he sucks a sharp breath between his teeth, a bone-deep, radiating ache humming between his lungs, spreading through his ribs and along his spine as he rests against the cold rock.  The sky above is a tumultuous sea of grey clouds and starry blackness, some sliver of silver light haloing behind the plumes, heavy and cold. 

Sweat drips from his nose, rolling down the sides of his face as his eyes flutter shut, face flushed from exertion, from reaching out and digging into the ground, the nature of the Force pulling and ripping through him, bending both to his will and against it.  Still, for the struggle that he endured, the ravenous energy that burned his soul from the inside out amidst his channeling, he does not regret his actions, his choice to stand his ground and push back, to let her go, to let her run and be safe.

It was the only choice, really.  What else could he have done?  Separated as they are, with an indecisive maze constantly warping and changing the paths between them, he had to keep her safe—and with their Bond, he was able to see her, he was able to feel her pain and her panic, to know that she needed him.  Whatever the creature was, it had been gaining on them, on her, the misting tendrils lashing out in an effort to latch onto her, onto her strength, her signature, her resolve.  And the moment that he saw her break, saw her fumble and fall, Kylo knew that he would destroy it all, and himself, before it destroyed her.

But he’s pushed the limits far more than he’s ever done before.  Even with Snoke, the cruel and malevolent mentor that he was, did not quite expose his efforts to this extent.  At least, not in this fashion—through manipulation of darkness, sure, gold and relentless tirade that it can be.  But to command the raw essence of the Force, to be a projection utilizing such strength, such will as to keep a writhing and haunting creature at bay for the sake of another, is not something he excels in.  A sacrifice of dominance for concentration, for compassion, perhaps, on his part, yet he remains alive, as does she, and the creature had lost interest in beating itself against an invisible shield that it could not penetrate, no matter how viciously its jagged-toothed maw clashed against the tide.

His chest throbs, phantom spasms of agony wrenching through his torso, humming under the scars from the saber, from the bowcaster, from memories that once fueled his anger, his rage, and his power.  Now, they just _hurt_ , sapping what little else he can possibly cling to, a few traitorous tears welling and spilling from the corners of his eyes to mingle with sweat and filth as they carve down his face.  Grief from pain; once he might have felt that it was weakness, folly to cry over such as this.  Now… there’s nothing.  Nothing but the drumming of tension, cutting the fissures in his bones and his soul deeper and deeper with each heartbeat, the tether that curls and remains tight in his core splintered, but present. 

Opening his eyes once more, Kylo looks up to the starry skies, to the clouds as they churn and roll along, the halo of moonlight still shimmering, and painting the walls around him in tarnished silver.  A breath escapes him, exhausted and faint, tickling chapped lips as he swallows dryly around a knot that seems to swell into a fist.  _Too much_ , he thinks to himself as he watches the clouds, in need of water and rest and her.  _Too much._

But worth it, no less.  Worth it to protect her, to shield her, to urge her onward to some place, _any_ place, other than this.  Somewhere she could catch her breath, somewhere she could rest and regain her strength.  Somewhere a creature of mist and bone, of gnashing teeth and hatred in its dark stare, would not consume her, ravage her, tear her to pieces and end her.  Not if he had something to say or do about it, at any rate.  Not if he could fight back.

Huffing, he turns his head and glances down toward the right, cobblestones paving the way into darkness, a curve he took seeming so far away now, the memory of having traversed it lost to the sea of weariness.  To the left, just the same, with bits of moss and dying vines poking between the rocks, seeming to twitch and breath under the shifting moonlight.  Cold, and empty, save for him, leaning against the wall, with his legs stretched out and his feet falling to the sides. 

Biting his lip, Kylo closes his eyes once more, resting a gloved hand against his abdomen, leather pressing to thick wool and heavy cotton.  His chest twitches in response, sides thrumming with soreness as he bites down on his tongue, suppressing a low groan.  Even through it, through the torment of exertion, he can feel it—his pulse, and the second that beats just.. _off_ from his own.  Hers.  Steady, slow, rolling with a rhythm that begets calm, and rest. 

But alive.  _Here.  I’m still here,_ he thinks into nothing, hopeful that it finds her, that it reaches her.  There’s no response.

Swallowing again, he slumps further into the stonework, back bent and head lolling to the side as he tastes iron on his teeth, having bit too hard on the edge of his tongue.  No matter.  He’s alive.  He is alive enough to taste the blood, to feel the nick he left behind, the soreness in his muscles and the exhaustion in his bones.  He is alive enough to focus his attention, his breathing easing to a gently in on five heartbeats and out on ten, feeling that perfect and beautiful melody under his skin that is _her._

Wherever she is, he will find her.  He will find her, and he will protect her, shield her, for those moments like now where she could not shield herself, where her own determined spirit could not propel her any farther.  Damn it all if he fails.

Clenching his jaw, Kylo shifts, pushing himself back up the wall once more, unsteady legs shaking as his boots scrape in their effort to find proper footing.  Rolling a little to the side, he braces an arm against the rock, kneeling first before tucking a foot under and pushing up, stumbling but a step before he stands.  His chest aches, heart pounding heavily between his lungs as he leans against the wall, hair hanging in front of his sweat-slicked face. 

He needs to move, he needs to keep going; he might have been able to hold the creature at bay to keep Rey safe, but he was in no real danger himself.  He wasn’t with her, he wasn’t really _there_ , which means the beast could find him.  And with the ache that permeates under his skin, hollowing out his bones, he is unsure if he could stave the damn thing off a second time.

The first few steps are accompanied by stuttered, low grunts, breath hissing between his lips as he cradles his side, hot flashes of agony pulsing under the wool and scarring from the injury sustained from the bowcaster.  His head reels, momentarily, bits of white rage flickering between his eyes and his ears, old habits pressing in and begging him to channel the pain, channel the bitterness of his wounds, no matter how healed and faded they may be.  But where once was blind determination, now there is only the soured and nauseating sensation of weakness burning on his tongue and squeezing his throat. 

He’d chastised her for pushing too hard, for ripping open the cuts she’d sustained in the desert.  And here he is, now, on the verge of sickness from having done just the same.  _Foolish_ , a snake’s voice tells him.  _Necessary_ , he replies.

The walls pass in a blur, unchanging and relentless, their slate and their grey coloring glimmering with damp bits of moss and dew, the moonlight overhead cold and faded as ever.  Gnawing on the inside of his lip, Kylo limps along, one hand still pressed to his side as the other trails against the stones, catching moss and debris, the occasional vine that rattles and breaks off from the slightest of tugs. 

His tongue is thick in his mouth, cheeks dry and throat sticky, dehydration sapping what his own overexertion does not, and he sputters and coughs as spittle gets caught somewhere between his throat and the back of his mouth.  Eyes burning, he bows and spits, ignoring the smear across his lips before he straightens once more, and continues to walk. 

 _Water_ , he begs, as though this realm might acknowledge him, heed his needs and fulfill that which he yearns for.  _Water, and somewhere safe,_ for he has no desire to encounter any more dangers, anything else that would dare swallow him whole and prevent him from seeking answers, and a way out.  It is desperate, sure, but unlikely as it is, he has to try, for maybe his previous requests were too bold, too much for this labyrinth to give. 

Or, perhaps it’s not so unlikely after all.

Rounding a corner, he blinks as he comes upon an arch, wind howling through the stones where once there had been no other sound than his steps and his ragged breathing.  Raising a brow, Kylo glances back over his shoulder again, finding the path he’s walked untouched, and lying in his wake.  Forward again, and the arch remains, towering another five or ten feet above the walls themselves, the sky still dark beyond it.

Unassuming, but he’s learned to take caution with such artifacts.

Clearing his throat, he steps forward again, walking until he stands just before the arch, the curvature of it seeming almost to sway in the wind that now tousles his hair and billows through the fabric of his coat.  He grimaces, before looking through the opening again.  Dark skies, clouds, the glow of moonlight.  It all looks the same.

But it beckons, the air sweet and cool, the soft smell of… of grass and… water.

Instinct tells him to lunge, to dive through the arch, but sense grounds him, and so he steps, reaching out first with his hand as he passes through. 

Nothing happens—at least, not to him.  There’s no sensation of reality shifting, there’s no pull or push of the Force, there’s nothing.  But the path he had seen before is gone, and he stands a handful of paces from the edge of a gleaming pond, wet moss beneath his feet, reeds flecked along the outer ring of the water, the silhouettes of dozens of trees circling it and him.

Up above, the darkened sky is instead a sea of purple and blue, pocked with flickering stars and a massive, smooth and silver moon.  Untouched, unblemished, and perfect.  Swallowing slowly, he blinks and looks down again, to the pond that reflects the glow, but he does not see the moon, or the stars in its surface.  Wind gusts and rolls through his hair and clothes once more, a chill creeping along his spine as his teeth chatter briefly.

His breath plumes in front of his face, wispy and fair before it disappears all together.  Forward, he steps, moss shifting and squishing beneath his boots as he comes toward the edge of the pond.  Reeds and fronds of grass flutter in the breeze, but the pond’s surface does not ripple, and the trees across the way do not come any closer than they’d been before.

Even in the strangeness, there’s… there’s comfort her.  The ghost of familiarity as he takes in the blackened silhouette of a distant forest, the calm mirror of the pond’s silent surface, the wind shaking the plant life that currently tickles at his ankles and his shins.  Far away, he can hear faint creaking, aged wood moaning with the breeze, as though the last tendrils of life are crying out from the shadow of the forest. 

_What is this place?_

He steps, and something snaps, cracking like a whip that echoes on, and on, fading out only after too many heartbeats.  Glancing down, he sees one of the reeds beneath his boot, crumpled and pressed into the damp moss below.  Shifting his foot off the stem, he hears another faint crunch that echoes less but still shudders through the air, dancing on the wind that fans against his cheeks.  Stepping to the edge, Kylo kneels before the pond, admiring the glass-smooth surface, the reflection perfect and pure even though there are no stars or moon to be seen within it.  Just purple and blue sky, and the shadows of grass and reeds along the curve. 

Tentatively, he tugs on the fingers of his left glove, skin pale and prickled with cold as the wind touches it.  Biting the inside of his cheek, he extends his hand, fingers twitching lightly as he leans, and touches the surface of the pond. 

It’s cold, giving way to his touch the way water does, rippling from his disturbance.  Drawing back, he inspects his fingertips, finding his skin wet, and shining in the moonlight.  When he tastes it, it tastes the way water should, clear, some strange essence of minerals like from the rivers and oceans of Takodana, Ahch-To, even the distant planet of Naboo. 

Reaching again, he cups his hand into the water, bringing a mouthful to his lips, drinking with a soft moan as his eyes slip shut.  It’s cool on his tongue, soothing the barren hollow in his throat, a shiver trailing down his front as he feels gulp after gulp settle in his stomach.  His breath fogs in front of his face again as he sighs, thicker this time, curling around his mouth and his nose before rising into the air.

He watches it, lips wet and a bead of water trickling down his chin as the mist seems to hover before dissipating at last.  Returning his attention to the pond, Kylo cups another handful of water, soaking his fingers before bringing his hand to his face, scrubbing away sweat and traces of dirt, sighing as the chill soothes his heated and clammy flesh.  The scar is puckered, and thin beneath his fingertips, and he follows the line down his cheek and his throat.

_Rey…_

_Do you have water?  Do you have shelter?_ He finds himself worried, something sharp and bitter gnawing at his core as he gazes into the pond, its surface smooth once more like a sheet.  Still, the same purple-blue, the same star-and-moonless sky, and his own face, his gaze staring back at him.  Hair hanging around his shoulders, the scar carving across his brow and his cheek, his dark eyes worn and weary, bruise-like shadows beneath them. 

He looks as awful as he feels, and there is not much comfort in that. 

About to look away, there’s a moment where something flashes in the pond.  Frowning, Kylo blinks, before focusing again, staring hard into the water’s surface as he waits for some confirmation of trickery played upon his exhausted mind, or something far more mysterious lurking within the pond.  A heartbeat, and then two, his gut twisting in momentary anticipation before the color of the sky fades, his image disappearing in smoke.

_What—_

_Rey_

Eyes widening, he gazes into the water, the smoke clearing until he sees the same cobbled and moss-ridden walls of the labyrinth, shrouded in cold darkness.  Inching lower, he sees Rey curled up against the corner of the path, skin bruised and riddled with cuts and dirt, her knees tucked to her chest, her face streaked in sweat and grime, lines carving down her cheeks in what he can only surmise as the tracks of tears.  Her arms are tucked on top of her legs, her head pillowed on them as she sleeps, occasional shivers jerking her shoulders.  All the same, she is there, asleep, breathing steady, and slow, and unaware that he is watching her through the shimmer of a pond.

No.  A mirror. 

“Rey,” he says, gentle at first, unsure of whether she can hear him, or sense him.  The wind kicks up again, whipping through his hair, the distant creaking of the trees louder than it had been before.  “Rey.”

He sees her eye twitch, her head shifting, but she does not stir.  Biting his lip, he reaches out again to touch, as if he might be able to slip through, to grace his fingers against her cheek, through her hair—

But he’s met cold steel, the image— _Rey_ —just out of reach, the pond’s watery give now hard, separating him from her. 

Frowning, he swallows his racing heart with a mouthful of anguish and a quiet huff, tears stinging the corners of his eyes as he lays his palm against the solid surface, his fingertips just brushing against where he should feel her hair and her temple. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also whoops apparently the last chapter made it sound like Kylo/Ben was dead
> 
> surpriiseee? not dead? XD
> 
> also big fucking thank you to AquaWolfGirl for getting me through this chapter. It was a bit of a doozy, and there was some content she convinced me to save for a later chapter, so thank you thank you thank you babe <3


	10. - X -

When her eyes flutter open, there is only darkness.  A cloudless, starry-night sky, with the gleam of moonlight shining off damp moss and slicked stones.  Wind whistles through the walls, ruffling her hair and her loose, mussed clothes, sending a shiver down her spine.

Grimacing, Rey flinches as she shifts, her shoulders pinched and neck pulsing with pain, a crick flaring along the left side from resting against rock, her chin dipped into her chest.  Worse sensations she’s felt before, sure, but amidst a bone-deep soreness from running for her life, cuts and scrapes still healing on her palms and her calves, this is just icing on an already shit-pastry that leaves ash in the back of her tacky mouth, her lips dry and gunky at the corners. 

Bringing an arm up, she scrubs her mouth against the dirty fabric of her wrappings, ignoring the smear of dead skin and grime as she looks up and down the path once more, seeing nothing but the cobblestones, the moss and vines clinging to the walls, the very trappings of her surroundings seeming to bend and quake with sighs.  Occasionally, the wind ripples loud enough that it sounds like a low moan, and another shiver carves its way down her back.

Her knees are tucked up to her chest, her arms looped around her small torso to stave off the chill as she glances up to the sky once more.  Though there’s moonlight glowing off the rocks, she cannot see it from her vantage point, and she thinks briefly of the place she first fell into—with the glade, the pond that wasn’t a pond, and the distant tree-line that remained silhouetted and out of reach.

A lifetime ago, that place.  How many days have passed since she woke there, and found her way here?  How many days since she and Ben found themselves trapped here, no doubt entire galaxies from the _Supremacy_?  How long has it been since all this began, she wonders?

Could she go back there, if she tried hard enough?  It seems, so far, to be the only place that hasn’t yet caused her any pain.  The desert that felt like Jakku, but colder and sharper, left her cut and scraped, horrified by the sands made of ground bones and decay, a dream haunting her that still resides in the back of her mind, meaningless and uncertain.  Is that the future?  Was it the past?  What reason would the shadow of Kylo Ren, masked, surrounded by a troupe of soldiers among a field of bodies, lie in wait for her?

Or was it the beginning of something more sinister?  Or something more compassionate? 

She remembers seeing the other places—the swamp with the thick trees and steaming waters, and the ocean of salt crystals and blue waves, smelling bitter and rich in minerals.  She has not been there, and finds herself praying that she never finds herself there.  The center of this labyrinth, with its temple and its domed roof, is the key, yet it feels as though the closer she potentially gets, the farther back she’s then pushed.

Biting her lip, Rey unfurls her hand and inspects her palm.  The cuts and scrapes are still their angry, bitter red, but the scabbing seems to be thicker now than it was before, a sign of healing.  It is not enflamed, or even irritated, and so the risk of infection or fever is minimal, but it would be wise to be careful moving forward, lest she try the hand of fate further in this wretched place.

_Be careful._

Such a faint whisper to the shell of her ear, reminiscent of his voice.  A whimper bubbles on her tongue as she closes her hand again, blinking back treacherous tears as she tucks her arms around herself again, readjusting on the unforgiving stones of the labyrinth.  Be careful, he’d said to her, and yet he was the one to throw himself into the worst of the danger.  If bringing her own conscious mind above the walls of the labyrinth had ripped open the minor scrapes of her fingers and hands, what damage could have been wrought upon his own soul for projecting himself at her side, bending the Force around his will to shield her from that terrible creature?

Indeed, if the creature could not have harmed him, being that he was just an image, an illusion of the Force, manifested at her side as a result of their Bond, then what became of him after?  Did the Force tear into him for such strength as it had to her?  Or are the results of her own suffering because she, as he had said, does not have the understanding, the teaching, that he has? 

Is it truly so awe-inspiring, her sudden and growing mastery, that Luke was right to be afraid of her?

Clenching her jaw, Rey glances up and down the path again, wary now more than ever before of the possibility of that worm-like creature making a terrible return.  Should it sense her, find her, and begin the chase anew, she’s not sure she has the strength, the focus, to outrun it.  But how, then, had Ben been able to block it, to keep it from coming for her, when he himself had not even been here?  Yes, they touched hands, before, they held them just hours ago while they fled, but…

But to manipulate something that one is not even physically threatened by is a matter entirely beyond her.  Could he even see it?  Or had he seen into her mind to know what she faced, to know the danger of her circumstances?  It is, all together, possible that in their touch he could have become solid, clearer, that maybe for a brief moment he could have traversed the maze itself and _truly_ stood with her. 

She would have known, though, if he had been beside her, for real, and not just a projection.  She would have. 

How to get back to him, though, is the real question.  If one thing has become clear, more than ever, it is that they _must_ be together.  It’s safer that way, it’s smarter—as he’d said, when he found her in the tunnel, and looked upon her wrecked hands with sorrowful eyes.  If they’re to find a way to leave this dreadful place, this changing and warping labyrinth with its motley of equally atrocious corners, they need to do it together.

_Join me_

“Oh, Ben,” she sighs, a tear streaming down her cheek as she drops her head onto her knees again.

_What?_

She snaps up so quickly she almost hits herself against the wall, not having felt the tug, or heard the pop in her ears as the bridge becomes palpable once more, their minds connected again.  But now, turning to her left, she sees him sitting beside her, his shoulder nearly brushing her own as her world zeroes in on his face—pale, scarred, his lips full and red, his eyes so tender and dark.

“ _Ben_ ,” she says again, looking up at him, her own breath lost between the space of her chest and her throat, a tremor shaking her to the core.  He doesn’t blink, seemingly insistent upon soaking in every detail of her expression, her presence, beside him.  Though, as ever, only as much as their Bond allows.  In truth, if she were to consider the depth of all they’ve accomplished, and seen, the Force has been quite forgiving with what they can, and cannot do, together.

_What_?  He says again, though this time she swears she sees a flutter of a smirk at the corner of his mouth, his eyes flickering back and forth between her own.

“You damn _fool,_ ” she hisses, fresh grief welling in her eyes as she moves to strike his arm, inconsiderate of the possibility that her hand may pass through his arm—that this could be the one time the Force proves itself to be as malicious as it is benevolent.  But a sob wrenches itself from her lips as her fist weakly collides with wool, with a bit of leather, with the thick muscles of his shoulder.  Still, for all that it is, that _he_ is, she knows he’s not here.  “I thought you were _dead_ , I thought… I was—”

_I’m fine_ , he whispers, his brow furrowing slowly beneath the black threads of his hair, stringy and damp with sweat, or water, she can’t be entirely certain.  _I’m alive._

“Where are you?”  Rey insists, looking up at him again, forcing herself to suck a slow breath through her nose lest she choke, and the knot that currently pulses and frays in the center of her chest completely unravels, and ruins her from the inside out.  “Where are you? How did you stop it?  How did you get away from it?”

_I was somewhere else in the labyrinth,_ he confesses, his own legs tucked up, his arms resting on them as he shifts, and looks toward his gloved fingers.  _We connected, and I saw you running, but I couldn’t tell what you were running from.  Only that you were afraid.  You took my hand, and… for the first time—_

He trails off, his eyes focused on his fingers now, his lips still parted as though ready for the next word, the next part of his thought, but he remains silent nonetheless.

“What?”  She asks, blink back a few more tears, reaching up to wipe them away.

_I could see everything.  I could see you, the path you ran, the creature behind you.  I wasn’t there, not really.  But I could see it all.  And when you fell, I knew I had to do something._

“What _did_ you do?”

His eyes flick to her face once more, searching, memorizing. 

_It’s not something I can explain, or show, really.  It’s—it’s a feeling, it’s_ using _your feelings.  It’s… it’s something Snoke instructed me in._ He seems to pause here, jaw clenching slowly as he chooses the words carefully, his eyes wavering only for a moment before returning again to meet her gaze.  _Channeling the Force through your emotions, usually rage or suffering, using your agony to focus.  But it wasn’t agony that I felt, it was…an urge, an insistence to defend.  A wild abandonment of all that I’d known or understood, driven only by the thought that I had to protect you._

And it’s… it’s not really a surprise to her.  Not like it might have been a day ago, a week ago, that someone would bend the Force in such a way for the safeguard of another.  But his effort plays back in her mind, the raw and feral aggression in his eyes not being borne of the unbridled fury she’s so used to seeing in those near-black eyes.  No, that had been fierce and relentless resolve, dedication to a single purpose.

Her.

Her stare falters from his, sweeping across his cheeks, his lips, before she looks down to the spread of his throat that she can see above the thick collar of his coat, the scar carving its way along his jaw, disappearing under that fabric.  Swallowing a breath, Rey glances to his hands, to the leather that crinkles as his fingers twitch, curling just a little. 

“I thought you were dead,” she whispers again, unsure of what to say.  She thinks of the clarity she’d felt, leaving Ahch-To, the need to go to him, to pull him back into the light, how certain the future she’d seen had been.  His words are painstakingly raw, cutting down into the depths of her that seem to fizzle and hum with an energy that sears her insides and cripples the steadiness of her heart.  “And I’m not sure what’s worse—that I thought you were gone, or that I was _devastated_ by the possibility.”

_Devastated?_   He asks, his gaze unchanging, the low timber of his voice softer than she’s ever heard it before.  Her chin quivers, and she bites her tongue, before nodding slowly.

“Is that really so surprising?”

_Coming from the woman who once called me a monster, and who fired a blaster at me every chance she had, perhaps a little._

Pausing, Rey raises a brow as she glances at him, seeing a mirth in his eyes that she had not previously seen, nor ever expected to.  But in that moment, there’s something old, something familiar the weight of his gaze, the crook of his slight smile, that smells of worn leather, aged durasteel, and flickers with the distant humming of the _Falcon_.

“’S a good joke,” she teases, chuckling quietly as his mouth twitches, the corner pulling farther into his cheek as he looks away from her again.

_I’ve been known to make them from time to time._

“Can’t imagine you could make them too often.  First Order being all crotchety and the like,” she remarks, side-eyeing him with a soft hum.  If he has a comment on this, he does not say it, and she does not sense anything reprehensible from him through their Bond.  Though, maybe, there’s a little bit of a smile still clinging to the corner of his wide mouth.

Clearing her throat, Rey tilts her chin up, looking to the darkened sky again.  “Where are you?”

_By a pond_.

Her heart skips.  “Is the sky, like, purple and blue?  Starry?”

_With a perfect, unblemished moon_.

She sighs, her shoulders sagging a little.  At least he’s somewhere safe, then?

“How did you get there?”

_I thought about water, and when I turned a corner, there was an arch in the labyrinth’s path.  When I walked through it, it brought me here_.

She nods once.  “That’s where I was, when I first woke up here.  Lying in the moss, not far from the water.”

_The trees don’t get any closer, do they?_

“No, they don’t.”  Folding her arms around herself, she brings her knees closer to her chest, eyeing him carefully.  “What do you make of it?  Of the pond?”

_It’s cold.  Refreshing, though._ He glances to her, and sees her frown, her furrowed brow, and he mimics her.  _Was it not for you?_

“No,” she says, shaking her head some.  “It… it was solid.  Like ice, or like steel, I don’t know which.  But I could walk on it.  And then—”

_Then?_

“I.. I remember walking across it, yeah?  And the air was cold, so my breath was thick—it was fogging in front of my face to the point I could barely see.  When I looked down, I could see my reflection, like it was a mirror.  I could see the stars, the sky, but no moon.  And then I fell through it.”

It sounds so strange to recall the experience, but there is no other way to describe it.  She’d walked across the pond that wasn’t a pond, because it was solid and reflective instead.  She’d lost her bearing, nearly buckled over and stared down into the surface, staring upon her own face before it all went topside, and she fell. 

Sighing, Rey shakes her head as she brings a hand up to her hair, carding her fingers through the tangles and knots, pulling free the small band that she’d used to keep some of it at bay.  Most of the bindings for her buns had been lost on Ahch-To, but this one remained.  Admiring it in her hand, she feels Ben’s eyes on her, watching her as she stares at the bit of leather and elastic. 

_I saw you—in the reflection._

Shifting her attention, Rey looks up into those brown eyes, something warm pulsing at once inside her chest. 

_A fog rolled over the surface, and when it cleared, I saw you.  I saw this path, these walls, and you—you were asleep, with your head on your knees.  I tried calling to you, reaching out to you, but whatever it is, it kept me from you.  I don’t think you heard me._

“I didn’t,” Rey murmurs, her eyes wavering briefly to his lips, before she turns away again.  He saw her through the mirror, the pond, _whatever_ that blasted thing is.  He saw her, but he couldn’t touch her, couldn’t speak to her, not like the way their Bond allows, at any rate.  Perhaps it was just an image, a promise that she was all right, that she was safe as a result of his efforts, his sacrifice.

Sacrifice.

“What _actually_ happened to you?  After you did the—the thing?”  She asks, changing the subject once more while waving her fingers loosely at him, at his hands.  His gaze wanders to the leather of his gloves, creaking as he flexes his fingers slowly.

_I felt drained, wracked with soreness, but nothing beyond what I have previously experienced.  It was more than anything I’d ever done, but… but I have to wonder if this place, this labyrinth, whatever it all is, if it somehow makes everything that much…_ more.

“More?”  Rey inquires, shifting a little a she turns to face him further.  Ben’s expression hardens, contemplating if only for a heartbeat, before he softens again, his dark eyes lingering on her face.

_The Force is an energy, and as such, bending it to your will requires energy.  Your own energy.  It’s the same as what binds everything together, but it’s also a part of you, just as you are part of it.  Using it means using yourself._ He sighs, tilting his head as his stare becomes lost, inquisitive, searching for the right words to a question he’s never had to answer before.  Rey waits, watching him closely, before he continues. 

_I’ve channeled the Force in ways that have left me aching, my hands torn open, like yours are, the very depth of my soul seeming to be_ on fire _from the lengths I went to manipulate it.  But I always assumed that was a result of the Dark Side, that in order to use such power, one had to invest everything that they are—body, soul, all of it.  But you… it was not Darkness that guided you, that painted your signature over everything, but I don’t think it was Light, either._

“You think this place is… just… _raw_ Force?”  Rey whispers, eyes narrowing as she leans in, as if the proximity may yet yield different answers, clearer answers. 

_What else would it be, if not that?_   _It has no one pull, it seems to challenge us, and reward us.  If not balanced and primal, what could it be?_ He replies, the words so low and quiet that she almost has to strain to hear him. 

Even still, his voice washes over her like a wave, comforting and kind, and Rey hums as she draws her knees tighter against her chest, her arms wrapping around her legs.  She can feel, if she thinks about it enough, the prickling fibers of the wool of his coat, the quilted material tickling her skin, the heat emanating from his figure.

It’s almost enough to make her believe he’s truly _here_.

_I am here_.

“No you’re not,” she replies bitterly, avoiding his gaze as the corners of her eyes burn once more.  “Not really.”

Not the way she wants.  Sure, she could lay her head upon his arm, his shoulder, feel the weight of it, smell the leather of the sleeves, of his gloves.  Her mind can conjure the image all it wants, her heart coloring in the fine details of all that he is until she’s certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that he is truly and completely _beside her_ , heart beating, body warm, arms safe and protective around her.

And she wants to believe that.  She wants to believe that she can wish him, conjure him into existence through the will of the Force.  If she could see his future as solid and clear as she sees everything else, why not him?  Why not have this—the true and tangible feeling of his shoulder against her, his hip near hers, his knee aligned with her own?  Why would the Force go to such lengths to make her _believe_ their Bond is strong enough to manifest him here, completely and utterly, without _actually_ doing so?

All the same, no matter her hopes, her prayers, her desperation that clouds her chest and weakens her resolve, her patience, the echo remains in her head, the gently wave of their Bond pulsing like a heartbeat from her mind to his, her heart to his, her soul to is, the tether flickering between them, coiling around all that they are.  They may touch, they may speak, he may at last see her surroundings, but it’s not the same.

He is not here.  And she hates that she wishes so desperately it were not so.

There’s a shift, a scraping of wool against rock, leather against skin, before Ben’s arm _surely_ tucks around her curled form, drawing her in to his side, her head against his chest.  And Rey doesn’t even try to keep the tears from rolling freely, a panicked sob wrenching from her lips, muffled against the quilting of his coat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank yoouuu Aqua for helping me through this one <3


	11. - XI -

Eventually, his image blinks out, and she’s left alone once more, the cold of the stone at her back and seeping into her bones, the inky-black and silver-pocked skies overhead glittering with midnight quiet.  The winds continue to rustle and ripple through the paths, tumbling around corners, the vines hissing as they flutter in the breeze.  But all else remains still, and silent, and for that Rey is immeasurably grateful.

She does stand, brushing herself off once Ben is no longer at her side, the pressure having popped between her ears, leaving her hollowed and empty once more.  She knew when she opened her eyes again that he would be gone, and while the dissatisfaction of loneliness perpetually gnaws at her ribs, tearing more and more from her soul, there is still warmth along her cheek from where her face had been pressed to the thick fabric of his coat, the weight of his arm lingering like a shadow around her shoulders, his gloved fingers in her hair.

Courage must be what pushes her forward, ambiguous yet it may be, for it is not rest that soothes her aching limbs or weary mind.  The crick still flares from time to time in her neck, her shoulders tight, her skin scraped and dirty from the brawls in the sand, the tension of her reach, the run through the maze.  No, it must be courage, and hope, for nothing but some sense that their meetings will not keep occurring through the will of their Bond, but of their tried and true selves finding each other.

He’s at the pond—that much she knows—or maybe he was, but is no longer, perhaps having moved on once their connection faded.  When she fell out of that space, she landed in the bone desert, yet he’d spoken of passing through an arch and walking into the dark glade in a flash.  If such vexing portals exist amidst the labyrinth’s framework, why has she not fallen through more of them?  What is it that keeps her here, wandering the stones, helpless and afraid of rounding a corner and coming face to face with that creature once more? 

Breathing slowly, Rey curls and uncurls her fingers at her sides, feeling the scabs under her touch as she loops around a curve and makes her way up a steep flight of stairs.  The stones here are a bit slick, shining in the glowing moonlight that now hovers above like a pale white sun.  The first of many, to be sure, though much of what she’s encountered before has been flat, and even, a never-ending tirade of familiarity.

A moment passes through her as she climbs the stairs, and she reminisces on the sprawling mass that is Ahch-To, having traipsed across the mountain in search of tutelage, guidance.  In the beginning, there had been sunlight, possibilities beyond which she might not have been able to fathom before, until the world turned and changed, bearing upon her something inexplicably raw, with her Bond still fresh and strange between her and Ben. 

_Why did you hate your father?  Give me an honest answer—_

_I didn’t hate him_

She bites her tongue, inhaling slowly.  She had been so cold, so angry with him then, tears of anguish and vengeance welling in her eyes and rolling down her face.  She wanted to understand, wanted validation for a feeling that even she, knowing better of herself now, cannot express or justify.  She wanted justice then, for Han Solo, for the father figure she didn’t get to indulge in, or really have, for the visionary of a man who truthfully _would have disappointed her_.

No… he could not have answered her then, and so he didn’t.  But something inside her, whether it is a part of her core or her heart, insists that she knows the reasons.  He didn’t hate Han.  He didn’t hate Leia.  He didn’t hate any of them, he was just… _alone_.  Like her.  Isolated, uncertain of his place, his power, where he fit within the growing Resistance, the shadow of the First Order rising from the ashes of the Empire.  Unlike her, he had a name, a presence, a purpose that was painted for him, awaiting him with a legacy and a destiny that he didn’t ask for.

_And I became a Legend_

_You don’t belong in this story—you come from nothing_

Her isolation is not like his, not quite so encumbered with the depravation of failure, or of the hubris Luke mentioned—but there is serenity in solidarity.  He taught her that.  The moment she confided in him that the distress of the past, a melancholic apprehension of her future, and a stubborn drive to _comprehend the truth_ had propelled her forward to Luke Skywalker, to tutelage that did not serve, to _answers_ that resolved questions she did not ask, he was there for her.  _You’re not alone,_ he had said to her in confidence, in comfort, the hushed warmth of his voice such that she had not known then that she needed so terribly. 

_Neither are you,_ she replied, the whisper of it in her mind so faint.  Truer words she’s not sure she’s ever spoken, yet nothing could have prepared Rey for what was to come.  The grief that she would endure, the tears that would smart in her eyes and stain her cheeks.  The ones that she would see on his own face, mixing with sweat and dripping from his chin, mouth quivering with his hand outstretched to her— _Please_.

Always, he’s held his hand out to her.  Only once has she returned the favor, and it had only followed _after_ he soothed her own broken heart. 

Leaning against a jagged outbreak of the wall, Rey huffs a breath between her teeth as she stares down at her feet.  A low and impulsive throbbing bubbles to fruition at the base of her skull, teasing along her scalp until she can feel it beneath her temples, rattling behind her gums and her teeth.  He may have joked, teased that she was the one to always fire at him, to always reach for her blaster and shoot first, talk later.  But he’d been right.

_You need a teacher_

Two voices, in tandem, speak into her mind, one of softness but resignation and rejection, the other sharp and demanding, earnest, honest, and proud.  How ironically delightful that they were both right in such painfully different ways.

Glancing up again, she pushes onward, up the remaining stairs before stepping out into a courtyard, the labyrinth walls peeling away and rounding out around her.  Within the space, a few outcroppings of bushes flutter and rustle in the low breeze, colorful blossoms peeking between branches and foliage, the quiet babbling of a fountain catching her attention.  Across the way, some twenty or thirty paces at best, the waters gurgle and shimmer in the moonlight, a small geyser spraying up into the air before splashing back down into the basin.

Perhaps the better word is a trough—oval in shape, and sunk into the stones, it is not quite as large as the pond had been, but froths and ripples like water ought to.  Not the cold and unforgiving steel of a solid surface she had suffered before.  The barrenness of her tongue makes itself apparent, heat flashing under her skin as she glances about, looking to the shadows first before skirting around a few of the bushes, ignoring the flowers and the whistling leaves as she kneels beside the water.

Caution cannot steal more than a moment of her time before Rey is plunging her hands into the depths, hissing as ice cold water stings her fingers and her palms.  Regardless, she brings a mouthful to her lips, guzzling it quickly as the cold washes over her tongue, her teeth, spilling down into her throat.  Her chest buzzes, a chill creeping into her collar and her lungs as she takes another mouthful, and then another again, gasping between each swallow.  A blessing to be sure, one that she indulges in until her belly aches, her heart racing between her ribs. 

But still she drinks, uncertain of when her next will be after this, the panic and need to _quench_ this atrocious and terrible need in her gut fueling each manic plunge into the water.  The moon wavers in its surface, distant starts flickering like fireflies as she splashes handfuls against her face, her cheeks, scrubbing at her dirty skin.  Panting, gooseflesh prickles along her arms and her back, before she takes up the loose panel of fabric at her side to dry her face. 

Settling back on her shins, Rey breathes slowly as she admires the fountain, continuing its bouncing spray as it gushes and cascades against itself.  What she would have given to have had this sooner, at some point before now.  But that she has it at _all_ is a miracle, and she will be grateful for the moment that her thirst is satisfied; time may be an unknown construct in a place that constantly warps and changes, but even she knew that too much longer without and she would surely perish. 

And what a way to die.  Thirsty, desolate, and alone.

_Is that how they died—my parents?  Spent their last coins on water, or beer?_ _Did they spend it all at once or savor it?_ _Did they think about me as they did it, or did they push it all aside and forget, thinking perhaps that I would, one day, too?_ _Did they lay out under the sun, blistered and raw, their skin and their lips dryer than the sands they were fleeing?_

Something sharp twists in her gut, a wrenching and sinister thing that she can only describe as bitterness, as resentment, for the people who brought her into this world only to abandon her.  What fortune her tiny figure and hopeful heart must have earned them, to willfully leave her behind despite her screams, her sobbing, her pleading to the freighter as it vanished into the light of the day.

Lowering her head, Rey exhales slowly, a tremor pinching between her shoulders and dancing down her spine, tugging at the crick in her neck, flaring with a momentary sear of agony.  Alone—Maker, she feels _alone_.  A weakness it may be to think of them, to want them, to cling to the image of something that discarded her like trash, faith brimming in her bones that one day they would see the error they wrought upon her child-self.  And if they would not, that someone else might; that someone would see her and tell her _You’re not alone._

And how now, where once more she is, indeed, _alone_ , and the one person who makes her feel otherwise is not here.  Elsewhere, on this plane—just out of reach, on the very precipice of real, of tangible. 

_Let the past die_

Lifting her head, Rey looks to the gurgling fountain, to the waters frothing and spilling over themselves, waves sloshing along the edges of the oval trough, glittering and gleaming in the moonlight.  A chill touches her core, settling into her ribs, her lungs, every inch of her insides seeming to pulse and throb with the cold as it sinks into her center.  Where once it might have petrified her, a stone dragging her down into fearful depths, now there is… peace.  And violence.

Licking her lips, Rey shifts, moving from her knees to her feet, standing slowly once more, her gaze hard and narrowed as she refuses to let the fountain leave her sight even for a moment.  Tension thrums through her legs, her pulse quivering in her torso and between her fingers as she glares at the fountain before her, still bubbling relentlessly.  Shining in the silver light, its waters churn and swirl in the oval trough, black depths sinking lower than she can see, or care for. 

Something murmurs in her ear, like the buzzing of a bug, or the wind, and Rey ignores it. 

She takes a step back the soles of her boots scuffing quietly against the cobblestones as she glances around.  Still nothing within the shadows, save the bushes and the flower buds peeking out from between leaves and branches, moss and vines clinging to the distant walls.  Nothing has moved, nothing has changed, and she does not hear the insidious hiss of the creature that had chased her through the twining maze of the labyrinth’s many passages. 

It’s just quiet.

_Kill it, if you have to_

She breathes slowly, tasting ash and swell of fury on her tongue.

All right.

Swallowing thickly, Rey looks back to the fountain again.  For all that she’s come to understand of energy, of tension, of the binds of the galaxy, and the universe, perhaps the one thing that seems clearer than anything else is the truth of _feeling.  Using_ her feelings is a key, maybe even _the_ key, to making sense of the mess that is the framework of flickering, jittery electricity beneath her skin, between her bones, coiling and curling in her center like the gathering of star matter, condensing with fire, with rage and joy, with light and dark. 

Another buzzing close to her lobe, and she shivers involuntarily.

As before—on Takodana, in the basement of Maz’s cantina, and again on Ahch-To—

Rey feels the hissing whispers against the shell of her ear, indistinct as ever as it crawls up through the fog of memories and the rush of the last _Maker_ knows how many days, seeming to leech forth from the waters in some vindictive, warped, and shapeless effort to encroach upon her presence. 

A shadow crosses the fountain’s waters, twisting and bending, beckoning, lurching. 

_No—come back!_

_Quiet girl!_

Her teeth chatter as a burst of cold seizes the base of her spine, the flood of the cavern darkening her mind, the endless parade of her own face before her.  The ice, the wall that separated her from the darkened figures of what she wanted more than _anything_ to be her _family_ , seeming to cut between muscle and tendon.  As with Ben, with Luke, with even _Snoke_ , she feels the pull of something else, flickering to life within the darkness beneath the waves.

She reaches a hand out, fingers outstretched, vying for the waters of the fountain before her.  Her lungs ache, burning with frost and metal, the frigid nights on Jakku leaving her trembling, her tears soaking her childish face.  The haunt of her own childhood is fresh in the forefront of her thoughts, as though scooped up and shoved into her face, demanding to be seen, relentless until it is _felt_ —isolation, worthlessness—

Closing her eyes, Rey focuses, recalling the arid sunlight, the harsh sands beneath her feet, dusting against her brow as the meaty, ugly palm of Unkar Plutt gripped her elbow and tugged her away from the little port her parents left her at.  Their faceless shadows clamoring into a freighter, disappearing into the hot shine of the sun above, before the world seems to shift and spin, spitting her into the hollowed metal of the fallen AT-AT, the creaking walls doing little to protect her from the howling winds that carved between the cracks.

All real, all a part of her, but not the only thing she has, not the only part of her that exists.  _Scavenger_ , _outcast, garbage—_

_No,_ she thinks to herself, teeth bared, and eyes squeezed shut, _this will not be used against me._

Heat rushes in waves across her next, lapping first at her sides, crackling like the hum of a lightsaber, or the sudden bolt of a blaster.  Creeping in around her chest, snaking around her hips, her thighs, smoothing along her arms as she opens her eyes.  Her fingers are still outstretched, hand reaching for the fountain as the waters bubble and spray, ripples cascading against the natural flow from the energy that she commands.  It’s minimal, to start, but it’s a beginning.

_So lonely—so afraid to leave_

She gasps, the tug of curiosity drawing her head forward, before she pulls back, stabilizing herself again.  Whatever yet resides in those waters, whatever dark entities threaten to reach into her mind, to tear from her that which once would have crippled her, would have wrapped its spindly fingers around her insecurities and uncertainty, it will not have her now.  She will not bow, or break, and she will not yield even in the garish face of her most tumultuous nightmares.

It’s different, now.  _She_ is different, now. 

Gritting her teeth, Rey squares her shoulders a bit more, grunting as she flexes her hand, digging deeper into the heat that is currently enveloping her entire body, centralized in the hollow of her torso, near the base of her ribs.  It hums, vibrating with its own frequency, flaring with each press, each pulse of effort that extends from her fingertips, causing the waters to lash out in droves, sloshing against the stones. 

_That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be_

Another burst crackles under her skin, wrenching a cry from her lips.  Her hair flutters around her shoulders, the very air surrounding her seeming thick and hot, as another blast crashes against the fountain’s waters.  More of it sprays, slapping across the cobblestone of the courtyard, the rocks shimmering with the moonlight’s silver glow.  Her fingers tremble, and twitch, but she presses on. 

Ben’s words loop in her mind, the softness of his voice so dulcet and low that she thinks, for but a moment, that she could turn, she could feel the velvet warmth of his lips against her skin. 

Breathless, her fingers relax slightly, the tension withdrawing from her hand, her arm, the muscles brimming with aggression and grief.  The cold that had swarmed her so readily before does not reside within her now, heat having consumed it, the fire of existence, of purpose, roaring inside her bones and her soul, brighter than the hottest and brightest suns.  A tear stings in her eye, welling and rolling free down her face a she stares at the waters, misting out from a domed wave that forces their body across the stones, dumping the fountain’s contents over the rocks and bushes of the courtyard. 

_You’re nothing—but not to me_

Mouth parted in a breath that neither fills her lungs nor leaves her, Rey gazes upon the waves, the mist spiraling and dancing into the open air, kissing her cheeks and spraying over the opposite end of the courtyard.  Her hand, reaching, _pushing_ the water from the fountain, tightens and relaxes once more, before a final wave of raw _Force_ surges through her core and to her fingertips once more. 

With a low blast, the air cracks around the fountain, a heavy and echoing crash of water meeting stone ringing in her ears and off the walls.  Winds whip around her again, swirling and churning before settling like a snake at her feet, kissing her calves and her leather-booted toes before fading away at last.  Her hand lowers, trembling lightly as she stares across the compound. 

The water that had bubbled and frothed in the oval shaped trough now smears across the stones, the path ahead shining with wetness.  The trough itself is empty, damp and dark, a set of stairs, previously obscured by the waves, revealed, spiraling down into the blackness beneath the labyrinth floors. 


End file.
